Poster #198 - Stopping at Nothing: Can 2-year-olds Differentiate Between Interrupted and Abandoned Goals?

• In Event: 3-106 - Poster Session 11
  In Poster Session: PS 11 Section - Social Cognition

Integrative Statement

Being able to attribute goals to other agents is important for many of our day-to-day activities. The ability to attribute goals to others emerges early in the first year of life and rapidly becomes increasingly sophisticated (Csibra, 2008; Kim & Song, 2015; Liu & Spelke, 2017; Luo & Baillargeon, 2005; Luo, 2011; Sommerville, Woodward, & Needham, 2005; Southgate, Senju, & Csibra, 2007; Southgate & Vernetti, 2014). Because most research on goal attribution in early childhood implements experimental scenarios in which the target agent’s goals remain constant, however, little is known about how young children update their goal attributions over time, especially when the behaviour of an agent is ambiguous with respect to whether or not she is still pursuing a goal she has recently pursued.
In particular, we do not know whether children are able to draw upon information about external factors and agents’ internal motivational states in distinguishing between goals that have been abandoned and goals that have merely been interrupted. The ability to make this distinction is crucial for accurately updating representations of others’ goals. Research investigating whether children can fluently make this distinction would therefore deepen our theoretical understanding of the development of goal attribution, and would provide a valuable new perspective upon existing research in this area.
To test whether young children recognise this distinction, we developed an instrumental helping paradigm in which we manipulate the experimenter’s reason for not completing a goal-directed action. On test trials the experimenter begins to place a toy into one of two boxes (an initial location), but does not complete this action for one of two reasons. In the abandoned goal condition, the experimenter states that he has changed his mind and would rather place the toy in the other box (the alternative location). In the interrupted goal condition, the experimenter encounters a physical obstacle which prevents him from reaching the initial location. In both conditions the experimenter then asks the child to help. We measure where children help the experimenter to place the toy (initial vs alternative location) to see if they are sensitive to the experimenter’s reason for not completing his goal-directed action.
We tested 18-30 month-olds in the pilot study, using a within-subjects design consisting of 4 abandoned-goal trials and 4 interrupted-goal trials (N=12; status: August, 2018). The odds of helping the experimenter place the toy in the initial location were roughly four times smaller in the abandoned goal condition than in the interrupted goal condition (OR = 0.23 (CI: 0.06, 0.61)). A sample size of 20 was determined to provide at least 90% power to detect a medium-sized effect, as observed in piloting (alpha= .05). The results from this pilot data suggest that children may recognise the difference between interrupted and abandoned goals, and that this can guide their helping behaviour. Data collection of the main pre-registered study (submitted as a registered report) is estimated to finish in February 2019.

Authors

• Alexander Green, University of Warwick
  Presenting Author

• Barbora Siposova, Warwick University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Sotaro Kita, University of Warwick
  Non-Presenting Author

• John Michael, University of Warwick; Central European University
  Non-Presenting Author