ArticleOpen mind : discoveries in cognitive science2019
Minimal Cues of Possession Transfer Compel Infants to Ascribe the Goal of Giving.
Article in Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Core Moral Concepts and the Sense of Fairness in Human Infants.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2025Review
- The Representation of Giving Actions: Event Construction in the Service of Monitoring Social Relationships.Current directions in psychological science · 2024Article
- Nonverbal Action Interpretation Guides Novel Word Disambiguation in 12-Month-Olds.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2022Article
- Facilitation of object encoding in infants by the observation of giving.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Minimal Cues of Possession Transfer Compel Infants to Ascribe the Goal of Giving.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2019Article
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3 authors.
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Abstract
Human infants' readiness to interpret impoverished object-transfer events as acts of giving suggests the existence of a dedicated action schema for identifying interactions based on active object transfer. Here we investigated the sensitivity of this giving schema by testing whether 15-month-olds would interpret the displacement of an object as an agent's goal even if it could be dismissed as a side effect of a different goal. Across two looking-time experiments, we showed that, when the displacement only resulted in a change of object location, infants expected the agent to pursue the other goal. However, when the same change of location resulted in a transfer of object possession, infants reliably adopted this outcome as the agent's goal. The interpretive shift that the mere presence of a potential recipient caused is testament to the infants' susceptibility to cues of benefit delivery: an action efficiently causing a transfer of object possession appeared sufficient to induce the interpretation of goal-directed giving even if the transfer was carried out without any interaction between Giver and Givee and was embedded in an event affording an alternative goal interpretation.
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