Understanding humans' understanding of agency: studies with preverbal infants

人类思维的一个典型成就是认识到世界是由两种根本不同的实体组成：代理的行为由看不见的心理状态内部驱动，非代理的行为由类似规则的物理属性外部驱动。准确区分环境中的主体和非主体是人类生存和繁荣所必需的各种过程的关键第一步，从基本的即时危险规避到与他人建立长期合作关系的能力。鉴于代理检测的本质，人类何时以及如何准确识别环境中的代理具有特别重要的理论意义，因此代理检测的发展起源在过去几十年中受到了相当多的实证关注。迄今为止，一种机构线索已经在成年人中得到了非常深入的研究，但在婴儿期研究中却基本上被忽视了：行动效果的效价。事实上，尽管大多数成年人都明确认为，行动的结果不应该影响一个人对导致结果的原因或原因的理解，但越来越多的研究表明，成年人仍然倾向于将代理归因于他们环境中特别积极或消极结果的原因。这些结果表明，对于成年人来说，看不见的心理状态与可观察到的现实世界行为和结果之间的关系是

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