Ten-month-old infants infer the value of goals from the costs of actions
Open accessAbstract
Ranking valuations on the basis of observed choices: Obliged to make a choice between two goals, we evaluate the benefits of achieving the goals compared with the costs of the actions required before deciding what to do. This seems perfectly straightforward, and it is unsurprising to learn that we can also apply this reasoning to others; that is, someone that we see choosing a goal that requires a more costly action must value that goal more highly. What is remarkable, as Liu et al. report, is that preverbal children can reason in this same fashion. Science , this issue p. 1038
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
There are already many reasonable computational models that try to directly capture Theory-of-Mind.
“there are already many reasonable computational models that try to directly capture this ability (e.g. 31; 32; 33; 34; 35; 10)”
From Large Language Models Fail on Trivial Alterations to Theory-of-Mind Tasks (2023) · cites this paper as [35]
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
The citation lists haven’t been fetched yet
References 50 · Cited by 230
Research works printed but not linked: 11
- D. C. Dennett, The Intentional Stance (The MIT Press, London, 1987).
- P. Muentener, S. Carey, Infants' causal representations of state change events. Cogn. Psychol. 61 (2010), pp. 63-86.
- A. E. Skerry, S. E. Carey, E. S. Spelke, First-person action experience reveals sensitivity to action efficiency in prereaching infants. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 110, 18728-33 (2013).
- C. M. Heyes, C. D. Frith, The cultural evolution of mind reading. Science. 344, 1243091 (2014).
- J. S. Mill, Utilitarianism (Oxford University, 1863).
- J. Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (Clarendon Press, 1879).
- C. G. Lucas et al., The child as econometrician: A rational model of preference understanding in children. PLoS One. 9 (2014), doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0092160. · DOI
- H. Wickham, ggplot2: Elegant graphics for data analysis (Springer-Verlag, 2009).
- G. Gergely, H. Bekkering, I. Király, Rational imitation in preverbal infants. Nature. 415, 755 (2002).
- A. Jern, C. Kemp, in Proceedings of the 36th {A}nnual {C}onference of the {C}ognitive {S}cience {S}ociety, P. Bello, M. Guarini, M. McShane, B. Scassellati, Eds. (2014).
- S. Russell, P. Norvig, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, Third edition (2014).
- Authors
- Liu, S., Ullman, T. D., Tenenbaum, J. B., & Spelke, E. S.
- Affiliations
- Harvard University (US)
- McGovern Institute for Brain Research (US)
- Corresponding author
- Liu, Shari
- Venue
- Science
- Published
- 2017-11-24
- Volume
- 358
- Issue
- 6366
- Pages
- 1038-1041
- ISSN
- 0036-8075 (ISSN-L)
- 1095-9203
- OpenAlex
- W2770204006
- Cited by
- 230
- References
- 50
- Citations by year
- 2026: 30 · 2025: 21 · 2024: 25 · 2023: 34 · 2022: 41 · 2021: 31 · 2020: 16 · 2019: 19 · 2018: 13
- FWCI
- 26.49
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- hdl.handle.net
- Licence
- cc-by-nc
- Locations
- Science (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- DSpace@MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc)
- Funders
- National Science Foundation (award311353, CCF-1231216, award311354, DGE-1144152)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Child and Animal Learning Development
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Social Robot Interaction and HRI
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Action Observation and Synchronization
- Keywords
- action costs, action planning, mental models, Bayesian inference, utility theory, effort, action understanding, social cognition development
- MeSH terms
- Child Development, Psychology, Child, Female, Goals, Humans, Infant, Male, Comprehension
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
