Understanding humans' understanding of agency: studies with preverbal infants

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A paradigmatic achievement of the human mind is the recognition that the world is made up of two fundamentally different kinds of entities: agents whose actions are internally driven by unseen mental states, and non-agents whose actions are externally driven by rule-like physical properties. Accurately distinguishing agents from non-agents in the environment is a critical first step for various processes essential for human survival and flourishing, from basic moment-to-moment hazard avoidance to the ability to enter into long-term cooperative relationships with others. Given the essential nature of agency detection, when and how human beings accurately identify agents in their environment is of particular theoretical importance, and so the developmental origins of agency detection have received considerable empirical attention over the last few decades. To date, one agency cue has been extremely well studied in adults, and yet largely ignored in infancy research: the valence of an action’s effect. Indeed, though most adults hold the explicit belief that the outcome of an action should have no bearing on one’s conception of what caused the outcome or why, a growing body of research suggests that adults are nevertheless biased to attribute agency to the causes of particularly positive or negative outcomes in their environment. Such results suggest that, for adults, the relationship between unseen mental states and observable real-world actions and outcomes is cognitively bidirectional: just as attributions of mental states influence evaluations of outcomes, evaluations of outcomes influence attributions of mental states. The research proposed below includes 4 sets of experiments using behavioural, eye-tracking, and EEG measures with infants from 6-12 months of age to follow up on exciting preliminary evidence from my lab suggestive that infants, too, attribute agency to the non-agentive causes of valenced (particularly negative) outcomes. Further evidence for this bidirectional relationship in infancy would support the possibility that mental states and action evaluations are mutually influential from very early in life, suggestive that bidirectionality is a fundamental aspect of the human mentalizing system.