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的：行为体的行为由看不见的心理状态内部驱动，而非行为体的行为由规则般的物理属性外部驱动。准确区分环境中的代理人和非代理人是人类生存和繁荣所必需的各种过程的关键第一步，从基本的即时风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地识别其环境中的代理人具有特殊的理论重要性，因此代理检测的发展起源在过去几十年中受到了相当大的实证关注。迄今为止，有一种行为线索在成年人中得到了非常好的研究，但在婴儿期的研究中却被忽视了：行为效果的效价。事实上，尽管大多数成年人都明确认为，行为的结果不应该影响一个人对导致结果的原因或原因的看法，但越来越多的研究表明，成年人仍然倾向于将行为归因于他们所处环境中特别积极或消极的结果。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在认知上是双向的：正如心理状态的归因影响结果的评估，结果的评估影响心理状态的归因。下面提出的研究包括4组实验，使用6-12个月大的婴儿进行行为，眼动跟踪和EEG测量，以跟进我实验室的令人兴奋的初步证据，这些证据表明婴儿也将代理归因于非代理原因的有价（特别是负面）结果。婴儿期这种双向关系的进一步证据将支持这样一种可能性，即心理状态和行为评价从生命的早期就相互影响，这表明双向性是人类心智化系统的一个基本方面。

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.