The Development of Intention Understanding in the First Year of Life: AnExploration of Infants' Understanding of Successful vs. Failed Inentional Actions.

Infant Cognition;Intention;Folk Psychology;Social Cognition;Eye Tracking;Failed Action;Psychology;Social Sciences;Psychology

Brandone, Amanda C.Tardif, Twila Z. ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Infant Cognition;    Intention;    Folk Psychology;    Social Cognition;    Eye Tracking;    Failed Action;    Psychology;    Social Sciences;    Psychology;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/77785/brandone_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

This dissertation explored the questions of when and how infants develop an understanding of intention—that is, an understanding of human behavior as guided by subjective internal states that underlie and are separate from actions and objects in the world. Failed action understanding was used as a marker of intention understanding because, unlike in the case of successful actions, understanding failed actions requires recognizing that the observed pattern of movement is distinct from the intention that motivates it. To explore the development of intention understanding in the first year of life, two key studies examined an understanding of successful- versus failed-reaching actions. Study 1 used a habituation design to assess both when infants (8-, 10-, and 12-month-olds) understand that a failed action is intentional and whether an understanding of successful actions precedes an understanding of failed actions. Study 2 extended this work to explore the process by which 8- and 10-month-olds develop an understanding of intention. Eye-tracking methodology was used to examine how infants process and predict the goals of ongoing successful and failed reaching actions. Moreover, performance was explored in relation to parent-report measures of infants’ social and motor behaviors.Three central findings emerged. First, already within the first year of life (by 10 months), infants understand and can predict the goal of a failed-reaching action. Second, during the course of development, understanding successful actions precedes understanding failed actions. Third, failed (but not successful) action understanding is strongly associated with infants’ tendency to initiate joint attention and their ability to locomote independently.Overall, results from this dissertation support a developmental picture wherein a rudimentary understanding of action as motivated by subjective internal states emerges during the first year of life from an antecedent understanding of action that does not go deeper than the surface relations between agents and objects. Preliminary evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that the emergence of this understanding of intention is related to experiences in joint-attentive social interactions that occur with increasing frequency as infants learn to crawl and walk. Developmental mechanisms and implications of an understanding of intention are discussed.