To evaluate infants’ intuition regarding what other people value, researchers showed them videos in which an agent (red bouncing ball) decides whether it’s worth the effort to leap over an obstacle to reach a goal (blue cartoon character).
Babies as young as 10 months can assess how much someone values a particular goal by observing how hard they are willing to work to achieve it, according to a new study from MIT and Harvard University. This ability requires integrating information about both the costs of obtaining a goal and the benefit gained by the person seeking it, suggesting that babies acquire very early an intuition about how people make decisions. "Infants are far from experiencing the world as a 'blooming, buzzing confusion,'" says lead author Shari Liu, referring to a description by philosopher and psychologist William James about a baby's first experience of the world. "They interpret people's actions in terms of hidden variables, including the effort [people] expend in producing those actions, and also the value of the goals those actions achieve." "This study is an important step in trying to understand the roots of common-sense understanding of other people's actions. It shows quite strikingly that in some sense, the basic math that is at the heart of how economists think about rational choice is very intuitive to babies who don't know math, don't speak, and can barely understand a few words," says Josh Tenenbaum, a professor in MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, a core member of the joint MIT-Harvard Center for Brains, Minds and Machines (CBMM), and one of the paper's authors. Tenenbaum helped to direct the research team along with Elizabeth Spelke, a professor of psychology at Harvard University and CBMM core member, in whose lab the research was conducted.
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