CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2024
| Author | Schlingloff-Nemecz, Laura Sophia Daniela |
|---|---|
| Title | Best behaviors: Young children's understanding of helping actions, its preconditions and consequences |
| Summary | To become competent social agents, young children must make sense of the frequently opaque behaviors of other people and draw appropriate conclusions from them. This dissertation is about how infants and children understand other agents’ instrumental and social actions (specifically, helping) by using a naive utility calculus, and the inferences they make from observed interactions to character traits. It comprises three sections. Section 1 addresses whether infants possess a concept of choice, and use it to generate the expectation that a goal-directed agent will choose the best of multiple available options, meaning the one that yields the highest rewards or requires the least cost to bring about. We argue that this capacity is a precondition for a mature understanding of helping, as the latter requires comparing the action options of the Helpee (contingent on whether or not she receives help) and the Helper (insofar as her options relate to the Helpee’s outcome). To probe whether infants can compare alternatives of varying utility, we conducted a set of looking-time and eye-tracking experiments testing whether they think an agent should approach a relatively higher number of goal objects, or a goal that can be reached at relatively lower effort. Section 2 explores infants’ and children’s understanding of helping actions. Specifically, we ask whether they possess a utility-based concept of helping whereby the goal of a Helper is to increase the utility the Helpee obtains in reaching her goal. To approach this question empirically, we ran a series of looking-time experiments with infants, as well as an experiment with preschoolers probing what they mean by the term “helping”. We also report a replication attempt of Hamlin et al.’s (2007) finding that infants prefer Helpers, a paradigm often used to probe their understanding of helping actions. Finally, Section 3 investigates whether children interpret third-party social interactions by spontaneously ascribing character traits to agents, and choose partners for their own cooperative endeavors accordingly. While it has been argued that young children, upon observing helping events, ascribe a stable prosocial disposition to a Helper, we maintain that it is unclear whether they do so spontaneously. We developed a tablet-based collaborative foraging game where the player first observes agents differing in helpfulness and skill, subsequently selects one of the previously seen agents as a partner, and plays together with the chosen partner. We used this game to study partner choice in 5- to 10-year-old children and adults across two cultural contexts (Hungary/Austria and Japan). The research described in this dissertation thus aims to shed light on the mechanisms of early action understanding (i.e., whether infants consider alternative possible goals), test whether a hierarchical action representation and naive utility calculus underlie young children’s reasoning about helping behaviors, and investigate to what extent the observation of cooperative interactions from a third-party perspective prompts children to infer traits and informs their own social decision-making. |
| Supervisor | Csibra, Gergely; Heintz, Christophe |
| Department | Cognitive Science PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2024/schlingloff_laura.pdf |
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