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"Let's Work Together": What Do Infants Understand about Collaborative Goals?
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Henderson, Annette M. E.; Woodward, Amanda L. – Cognition, 2011
Collaboration is fundamental to our daily lives, yet little is known about how humans come to understand these activities. The present research was conducted to fill this void by using a novel visual habituation paradigm to investigate infants' understanding of the collaborative-goal structure of collaborative action. The findings of the three…
Descriptors: Infants, Cooperation, Cognitive Development, Goal Orientation
Belief-Desire Reasoning in the Explanation of Behavior: Do Actions Speak Louder than Words?
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Wertz, Annie E.; German, Tamsin C. – Cognition, 2007
The mechanisms underwriting our commonsense psychology, or "theory of mind", have been extensively investigated via reasoning tasks that require participants to "predict" the action of agents based on information about beliefs and desires. However, relatively few studies have investigated the processes contributing to a central component of…
Descriptors: Cognitive Development, Beliefs, Adults, Cognitive Processes
Goal Attribution without Agency Cues: The Perception of "Pure Reason" in Infancy.
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Csibra, Gergely; Gergely, Gyorgy; Biro, Szilvia; Koos, Orsolya; Brockbank, Margaret – Cognition, 1999
Three habituation experiments examined the necessary conditions under which infants invoked the principle of rational action, interpreting behavior as goal-directed action. Found that the rational action principle operated at 9 months but not at 6 months. Perceptual cues indicating agency were not necessary prerequisites for a goal-directed…
Descriptors: Age Differences, Attribution Theory, Cognitive Development, Goal Orientation
Race, Causality, and the Attribution of Theory-Like Understanding: A Reply to Kim.
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Hirschfeld, Lawrence A. – Cognition, 1997
Responds to John J. Kim's critique of his studies of preschoolers' understanding of race. Maintains that his and others' investigations demonstrate that preschoolers differentiate the pattern of causal reasoning governing transmission and maintenance of racial characteristics from that governing transmission and maintenance of perceptually similar…
Descriptors: Attribution Theory, Causal Models, Childhood Attitudes, Cognitive Development
Children's Use of Counterfactual Thinking in Causal Reasoning.
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Harris, Paul L.; And Others – Cognition, 1996
Children ages 3 to 5 years old are observed in a series of 3 experiments assessing their use of counterfactual thinking in causal reasoning. Results suggest that young children readily interpret the cause of an outcome in terms of a contrast between the observed sequence of events, and a counterfactual alternative in which the outcome did not…
Descriptors: Abstract Reasoning, Attribution Theory, Cognitive Development, Cognitive Processes
Children's Predictions of Consistency in People's Actions.
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Kalish, Charles W. – Cognition, 2002
Three experiments explored the conditions under which inductive inferences about people were made by children and adults. Results indicated that children often predicted that people would behave differently in the future than they did in the past. Younger children limited predictions of consistency to non-psychological events. Older children…
Descriptors: Adults, Age Differences, Attribution Theory, Behavior Patterns