The Signature of All Things: Children Infer Knowledge States from Static Images

Resumen

From minimal observable action, humans make fast, intuitive judgments about what other people think, want, and feel (Heider & Simmel, 1944). Even when no agent is visible, children can infer the presence of intentional agents based on the environmental traces that only agents could leave behind (Saxe et al., 2005; Newman et al., 2010). Here we show that, beyond inferring the presence of agents, four- to six-year-olds can also determine the mental states that best explain an environmental trace. Participants (N = 35, M: 5.6 years, range:4.0 − 6.8 years) saw pairs of dresser drawers with different numbers and orientations of open drawers, and they were asked to de- termine which static scenes was generated by an agent with a given knowledge state (whether the agent wasn’t searching at all but was just playing, knew exactly where an object was hidden, knew the approximate location, had no idea where it was hidden, or at first didn’t know and then remembered). We compare children’s performance to a computational model that extends models of mental-state attribution to consider cases where the behavior is not observed but must be inferred from the structure of the environment. We find that children’s graded pattern of responded shows quantitative similarity to the predictions made by our model

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Cómo citar (APA 7)

Pelz, M., Schulz, L., & Jara-Ettinger, J. (2020). The Signature of All Things: Children Infer Knowledge States from Static Images. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/f692k