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：行为主体的行为是由看不见的心理状态驱动的，而非行为主体的行为是由类似规则的物理属性驱动的。准确区分环境中的代理和非代理是人类生存和繁荣所必需的各种过程的关键第一步，从基本的即时危险避免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具有特别的理论重要性，因此代理检测的发展起源在过去几十年中受到了相当多的实证关注。迄今为止，有一种代理线索在成人身上得到了非常充分的研究，但在婴儿研究中却基本上被忽视了：行动效果的效价。的确，尽管大多数成年人都明确地认为，一个行为的结果应该与一个人对导致结果的原因或原因的概念无关，但越来越多的研究表明，成年人仍然倾向于将代理归因于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在认知上是双向的：正如心理状态的归因影响结果的评估一样，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个月大的婴儿的行为、眼球追踪和脑电图测量，以跟进我实验室令人兴奋的初步证据，这些证据表明，婴儿也将代理归因于有价值（尤其是负面）结果的非代理原因。婴儿期这种双向关系的进一步证据将支持心理状态和行为评估从生命早期就相互影响的可能性，这表明双向性是人类心理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.