Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Humans have a strong “cognitive compulsion” to infer in-tentional agents from violation of randomness and such anagency–nonrandomness link emerges early in development.In two studies, we directly quantified, formalized, and com-pared both ends of this link for the first time. In Experiment1, two groups of participants viewed the same 256 binary se-quences (e.g., AABAAABA) and classified each as generatedby agents/non-agents or by nonrandom/random processes. Wefound a strong correlation between two judgments: sequencesviewed as more agentive also tended to be judged as less ran-dom. In Experiment 2, another two groups were asked toproduce sequences that others might appreciate as agentive ornonrandom. Participant-generated sequences in the two con-ditions had a substantial overlap, indicating common guidingprinciples of agency and nonrandomness generation. Taken to-gether, the present studies provide evidence for a shared cog-nitive basis of agency detection and subjective randomness.