Contingency Is Not Enough: Social Context Guides Third-Party Attributions of Intentional Agency
Contingency Is Not Enough: Social Context Guides Third-Party Attributions of Intentional Agency
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DOI：
10.1037/a0034171
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发表时间：
2014-03-01
影响因子：
4
通讯作者：
Carey, Susan
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Beier, Jonathan S.;Carey, Susan
四项实验调查了婴儿和成人是否会推断，一个以偶然的、交流的方式与实验者互动的新实体本身就是一个有意的主体。实验对比了这样一个假设，即这种推断只来自偶然互动的模态表征，与实验者的行为特征也可能影响故意归因的假设。12到13个月大的婴儿和成年人观察到一个新的实体对一个联盟实验者的偶然反应，其行为的形式因条件而异。对于婴儿，意向性归因是通过他们随后跟随无脸实体的隐含注意焦点的程度来评估的。对于成年人，意向性归因是通过他们后来描述实体行为时使用的心理学术语来评估的。在这两组中，实体作为意向主体的解释仅限于偶然交互条件的子集。在这两个年龄段，不同条件下的反应模式表明，观察到的偶然互动是否可以被视为一种社会互动，会影响有意代理的归因。这些结果进一步表明，作为一个情境敏感过程，响应第三方偶然互动的主体检测机制不同于响应直接经历的偶然互动的机制，之前的发展研究表明，这种机制仅仅基于实体对婴儿行为的偶然反应的模态表征。
Four experiments investigated whether infants and adults infer that a novel entity that interacts in a contingent, communicative fashion with an experimenter is itself an intentional agent. The experiments contrasted the hypothesis that such an inference follows from amodal representations of the contingent interaction alone with the hypothesis that features of the experimenter's behavior might also influence intentional attribution. Twelve- to 13-month-old infants and adults observed a novel entity respond contingently to a confederate experimenter, the form of whose actions varied across conditions. For infants, intentionality attribution was assessed by the extent to which they subsequently followed the faceless entity's implied attentional focus. For adults, intentionality attribution was assessed from their use of psychological terms when later describing the entity's behavior. In both groups, construal of the entity as an intentional agent was limited to a subset of contingent interaction conditions. At both ages, the pattern of responses across conditions suggests that whether an observed contingent interaction can be seen as a social interaction influences the attribution of intentional agency. These results further indicate that the agent detection mechanism responding to third-party contingent interactions, as a context-sensitive process, is distinct from the mechanism responding to directly experienced contingent interactions, suggested by prior developmental work to be based solely on amodal representations of an entity's contingent reaction to behaviors of an infant.