Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The naïve utility calculus theory of early social cognitionargues that by relating an agent’s incurred effort to the expectedvalue of a goal state, young children and infants can reasonabout observed behaviors. Here we report a series ofexperiments that tested the scope of such utility-basedreasoning adopted to choice situations in the first year of life.We found that 10-month-olds (1) did not expect an agent toprefer a higher quantity of goal objects, given equal action cost(Experiment 1) and (2) did not expect an agent to prefer a goalitem that can be reached at lower cost, given equal rewards(Experiment 2a and 2b). Our results thus suggest that younginfants’ utility calculus for action understanding may be morelimited than previously thought in situations where an agentfaces a choice between outcome options.