CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2021
| Author | Vorobyova, Liza |
|---|---|
| Title | INFANTS' EARLY UNDERSTANDING OF COOPERATION: An investigation into the cognitive prerequisites that guide resource distribution, agent individuation and prosocial motivation |
| Summary | Humans frequently and preferentially engage in cooperative activities across a broad variety of domains and the scope and complexity of human cooperation is unparalleled in any other species. Most cooperative activities in humans are characterized by a set of key properties, including mutual action coordination, sharing jointly obtained resources, partner choice, and a general motivation to cooperate. In the present work we investigate the ontogenetic origins of humans’ cooperative abilities. We propose that already young infants possess an evolved sensitivity to the key properties of collaborative joint activities, which can be experimentally demonstrated when they observe cooperative interactions from a third-party point of view. In our studies we show that young infants can, indeed, recognize and represent cooperative goal-directed interactions observed and draw inferences about the expectable behaviours of collaborating individuals, even before the infants themselves are able to actively engage in complex cooperative interactions with others. In particular, Chapter 2 explores infants’ expectations about resource distribution of jointly obtained food resources - food sharing following cooperative hunting - and demonstrates their ability to distinguish patterns of cooperative chasing from non-cooperative competitive or individual chasing of a prey. Our results suggest that 13-month-old infants expect agents who cooperated to obtain food to share it, while holding the opposite expectation (no sharing) for agents who were competing to catch the prey. In chapter 3 we propose and explore the hypothesis that tracking and feature-based encoding of the identity of individual agents are promoted and facilitated by engagement in cooperative social interactions (in contrast to individual or non-cooperative contexts). We demonstrate this in a change-blindness paradigm where 13-month-old infants are shown to successfully detect a change of featural identity of a cooperative agent (following its temporary occlusion) as a function of having observed the agent engage in a joint cooperative chasing action. No such feature-based re-identification was found, however, following individual chasing actions and other control conditions. We argue, therefore, that infants’ early ability to selectively encode the identity of a particular cooperative agent is beneficial for tracking the record of potential cooperative partners to aid future partner choice. Finally, in Chapter 4 we explore the ontogenetic emergence of the basic motivational disposition of humans to engage in cooperation. We report a violation-of-expectation looking time study which demonstrates that 13-month-old infants expect other agents to prefer to achieve their individual goals by acting together with another agent rather than acting on their own (when given the choice), even when acting together to obtain the goal is more costly than acting individually. This suggests that infants ascribe additional reward value to cooperative actions that goes beyond the observable instrumental utility of those actions. Together, the findings the studies reported suggest that by the age of 14 months infants are equipped with an ability to generate domain-specific inferences about agents’ expectable behaviours in cooperative contexts, as well as showing a basic motivation to engage in cooperative interactions with social partners even when such interactions do not yield immediate benefits. |
| Supervisor | Gergely, György; Téglás, Ernő |
| Department | Cognitive Science PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2021/vorobyova_elizaveta.pdf |
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