![]() ![]() This result supports the view that the bias to give teleological interpretation to actions is not entirely derived from infants’ experience.Ī moving cast shadow of the object affects the perception of the object’s trajectory in adults. The results were positive, demonstrating that featural identification of agents is not a necessary precondition of goal attribution in young infants and that the single most important behavioural cue for identifying a goal-directed agent is variability of behaviour. The present experiment tested whether 6.5-month-old infants would be willing to attribute a goal to a moving inanimate box if it slightly varied its goal approach within the range of the available efficient actions. While one-year-old infants liberally interpret the behaviour of many kinds of agents as goal-directed, a recent report suggested that younger infants restrict goal attribution to humans and human-like creatures. Human infants’ tendency to attribute goals to observed actions may help us to understand where people’s obsession with goals originates from. Implications of the results are discussed. The results indicated that the subjects detected that difference in contingency. However, in one it moved with the infant as for the habituation display (displaced backward), but in the other it moved against the infant (displaced forward). Both test displays were such that the magnitude of the retinal motion of the middle rod was the same as in the habituation display. Experiment 3 asked whether the contingency of the motion was detected or just the motion itself. Under these conditions, contingent motion was not detected. Experiment 2 was identical to Experiment 1, with the exception that the speed of the infant chair was decreased 50%. As the magnitude of the contingent retinal motion was only 0.32 deg/s, the results show that young infants are quite sensitive to such retinal change. The results suggest that the difference in retinal motion was detected and responded to. The other test display was spatially different from the habituation display but corresponded to identical retinal motions (a triangular configuration of rods). In Experiment 1, one test display was spatially identical to the habituation display but corresponded to different retinal motions (three aligned stationary rods). After habituation, two stationary test displays were shown in alternation. The outer rods were stationary and the middle rod moved contingently with the infant chair. While seated in a moving infant chair, infants were habituated to a display consisting of three vertical rods aligned in the fronto-parallel plane. Three experiments examined the sensitivity of 31/2-month-old infants to motion parallax.
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