3-128 - Beyond goal attribution: Children’s interpretation of choices as enduring individual preferences

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

A variety of work suggests that infants view others’ object selections as driven by goals or intended outcomes. Adults, of course, move beyond attributing goals, and often see choices as reflecting enduring preferences. A critical unanswered question concerns the conditions under which children interpret choices as stable preferences of individuals. Addressing this question can reveal important information about the scope and flexibility of children’s understanding of preferences, and speaks directly to debates regarding the cues children use to infer enduring mental states.

The first two papers examine whether children can represent choices as enduring preferences. Paper 1 finds that 3-year-olds, but not 2-year-olds, spontaneously infer that an agent will show consistent preferences across situations. Paper 2 shows that 10-month-old infants can generalize an agent’s choice to a new context, but only if the agent accompanies her choice with referential language.

The next two papers focus on how children generalize information about choices depending on who makes the choices and what the choices are. Paper 3 demonstrates that infants generalize an adult’s choice to other adults, but do not expect a child’s choice to extend to adults. Paper 4 shows that preschoolers tend to reject others’ unconventional choices, but can still use others’ unconventional choices to predict their future behavior.

By investigating goal generalization in infants and children, this symposium illustrates the flexibility with which children infer the link between choices and preferences, and sheds light on how humans begin to interpret choices as agent-bound mental states early in life.

Sub Unit

• Social Cognition

Chair

• Alia Martin, Harvard University

Individual Presentations

• Young Children’s Generalization of an Individual’s Preferences Across Situations - Presenting Author: Laura Garvin, University of Chicago; Rebecca Schmidt, University of Chicago; Amanda Woodward, University of Chicago

• The role of reference in 10-month-olds’ understanding of preference - Presenting Author: Alia Martin, Harvard University; Jessica A Sommerville, University of Washington

• Understanding mental states as belonging to specific agents in 10-month-old infants - Presenting Author: Dora Kampis, Central European University; Eszter Somogyi, Université Paris Descartes; Shoji Itakura, Kyoto University; Ildikó Király, Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest

• Naive realism influences preschoolers’ understanding of unconventional opinions - Presenting Author: Taylor Holubar, Stanford University; Ellen M Markman, Stanford University