Anna Krämer, Josef Perner University of Salzburg, Austria
When do children understand that a goal is not simply the end-point of an action, but something of value? According to Liu et al. (2019), 13-month-old children infer the value of a goal from the danger of an action using a cost-benefit analysis. When shown an agent jump (or refuse to jump) over trenches of different depth to meet up with one of two individuals, infants expected the agent to approach that individual for which the agent had accepted a higher risk (viz. jumped over a deeper trench). We replicated Liu’s findings with N = 32 adults (M = 30.25 years), of which 88% expected the agent to approach the ‘higher risk’ individual. However, in a changed version 81% of the adults also expected the agent to go to the individual present at the leap over the deepest trench, when the other trials ruled out a cost-benefit analysis. This speaks in favor of an attention hypothesis that the most spectacular leap draws attention to the bystander individual. At test, participants attend more strongly to that individual and use it for their prediction. In a next step, we want to see whether the attention hypothesis also applies to infants.
