Six-and-a-half-month-old children positively attribute goals to human action and to humanoid-robot motion

Recent infant studies indicate that goal attribution (understanding of goal-directed action) is present very early in infancy. We examined whether 6.5-month-olds attribute goals to agents and whether infants change the interpretation of goal-directed action according to the kind of agent. We conducted three experiments using the visual habituation paradigm. In Experiment 1, we investigated whether 6.5-month-olds attribute goals to human action. In Experiment 2, we investigated whether 6.5-month-olds attribute goals to humanoid-robot motion. In Experiment 3, we tested whether infants attribute goals to a moving box. The agent used in Experiment 3 had no human-like appearance. The results of the three experiments show that infants positively attribute goals to both human action (Experiment 1) and humanoid motion (Experiment 2) but not to a moving box (Experiment 3). These results suggest that 6.5-month-olds tend to interpret certain actions in terms of goals, their reasoning about these actions is based on a sophisticated teleological representation, and that human-like appearance of agents may influence this teleological reasoning in early infancy.