Innate Knowledge of the Social World

Innate Knowledge of the Social World

Psychology Live

Nov 18, 2009

Core Cognition

Object, Number, and Agent Representations

Core Cognition of Agency

Point representations of goal of behaviors, environmental constraints, rationality of action (means) given goals and environmental constraints. Interact in constraint satisfaction manner

Consistent interpretation given all three. Importantly, these are NOT behaviors 6- to 9 month olds engage indo no squeeze through apertures, jump over barriers.

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Primitive Building Blocks (Fiske)

Communal Sharing

Equality Matching

Hierarchy/Dominance

Cooperative Relations

Communal sharing

Shared goals

Helping others attain goals

Conclusions from thisrepresentations of goals, even representations of interactions among goals. Deployed for social attributions. Interact with causal representations, and

Representations of the social world. Predicts TOM in preschool years. Whereas variance in physical reasoning does not.

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Harm/Comfort

Help/hinder

Positive attitude to helper

Negative attitude to hinderer

Draws on representations of agency, but adds to them:

Represent actions in terms of goals, interactions of goals, and assigns valence based on relations

Harm/comfort

Positive attitude to comforter

Negative attitude to harmer

Draws on representations of emotional distress, and causal relations among agents, and assigns valence based on relations

Signif

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Motivation to Help

18-month-olds

Out of reach

Obstacles

Wrong result

Wrong means

Chimpanzees

Only out of reach

Questionwhy the difference? Greater TOMbetter able to understand the goals. Higher motivation for cooperative behavior.

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Dominance?

Question: do preverbal infants recognize cases of conflicting goals among agents, such that both cannot prevail?

Do they have any way of predicting which one will prevail?

Good candidate: size. Across the animal and social world, size is a cue to dominancethe dominant animal is larger, or makes itself appear larger, the subservient

one prostrates itself. We bow to our kings and gods.

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Novel agents, novel goals. Not agents the child would have any experience with nor goals that our youngest infants could realize.

Fambig one, little one. Imagine that the big one during familiarization was green and had always gone from left to right; small one blue and always gone from right to left.

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Expected outcome.

Notice, in no way is this contact causalitynot the big one knocking over the small one.

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Unexpected outcome. Logicunexpected draws attention. If recognize conflicting goal, and expect large one to prevail, should look longer at the unexpected outcome of the green agent prostrating itself and the blue agent prevailing.

Leaner interpretations: greater motion during when big one lies down and scoots. Measure from then.

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Test trials.

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Control. Same familiarization. But only one item on stage at time. Two intertrials, one for each agent.

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These are 12 and 13 month olds.

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In fact, dont have the slides here, but also true for 9 month olds. Not for 8 month olds.

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