Goal attribution to inanimate agents by 6.

5-
month-old infants
Gergely Csibra

School of Psychology, Birkbeck, University of London, Malet Street, London

WC1E 7HX, United Kingdom

Received 18 April 2007;

revised 5 August 2007;
accepted 12 August 2007.
Available online 14 September 2007.

Abstract

Human infants’ tendency to attribute goals to observed actions may help us to

understand where people’s obsession with goals originates from. While one-
year-old infants liberally interpret the behaviour of many kinds of agents as
goal-directed, a recent report [Kamewari, K., Kato, M., Kanda, T., Ishiguro, H., &
Hiraki, K. (2005). Six-and-a-half-month-old children positively attribute goals to
human action and to humanoid-robot motion. Cognitive Development, 20, 303–
320] suggested that younger infants restrict goal attribution to humans and
human-like creatures. The present experiment tested whether 6.5-month-old
infants would be willing to attribute a goal to a moving inanimate box if it slightly
varied its goal approach within the range of the available efficient actions. The
results were positive, demonstrating that featural identification of agents is not a
necessary precondition of goal attribution in young infants and that the single
most important behavioural cue for identifying a goal-directed agent is variability
of behaviour. This result supports the view that the bias to give teleological
interpretation to actions is not entirely derived from infants’ experience.

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