Infants expect an agent to choose a goal that can be reached at a lower cost
Abstract
According to prominent accounts of early action understanding, infants' interpretation of others' actions is undergirded by an assumption of utility maximization. However, it is unclear whether this assumption applies only to selection among actions or also to selection among goals. Here, using an eye-tracking paradigm, we investigated whether 14- to 16-month-old infants would predict an agent to choose a lower-cost option when faced with two identical outcomes that could be reached at different costs. Infants directed more looks to the lower-cost option, and this effect was not merely due to visual saliency. These findings corroborate the proposal that infants rely on utility maximization when reasoning about an agent's likely goal and provide evidence of an early ability to represent and compare alternatives in the context of goal attribution.