Will The Goal Always Win?

Megan SommerJessica Bury, Inae Colucio, Katie Wiseman, & Laura

Lakusta

Familiar faces vs. unfamiliar faces (Park, 2010)

Adult Preferences

Prefer patterns over plain color(Mauer & Mauer, 1988)

Prefer high contrast colors likeblack and white checkerboardover gray (Banks & Dannemiller, 1987)

Infants prefer end points overstarting points (Lakusta et al., 2007)

Infant Preferences

End Points & Starting Points

End Point(Goal)

Starting Point(Source)

Infants show a goal bias(Lakusta, Batinjane, & Yuschak, 2007)

-12 month old infants-14 month old infants

When remembering and describing events, adults and children show a goal bias.(Lakusta & Landau, 2005)

Goal Bias

How robust is the goal bias? Can we modulate the bias by manipulating

features of the source?

Experiment 1: increased the physical saliency of the source

Experiment 2: made the source causal

Current Study

Dependent variable: looking time

Participants: 15.5-16.5 month old infants

Design:◦ 8 familiarization trials◦ 6 critical test trials

3 Goal Events 3 Source Events

Method – Experiment 1 & 2

Experiment 1 – Physically Salientn = 13; Average Age = 16;7

Familiarization trials:◦ Duck alone 2x

◦ Plane alone 2x

◦ Objects 4x

Experiment 1 – Test TrialsPresented sequentially

Pair A Pair B Pair C

Experiment 1 - Results

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

35

40

Goal

Source

Ave

rage

Loo

king

Tim

ep < .05

Infants still look longer at and have a preference for goals over sources despite our manipulations.

The goal bias is robust!

Experiment 1 - Findings

How robust is the goal bias? Can we modulate the bias by manipulating

features of the source?

Experiment 1: increased the physical saliency of the source

Experiment 2: made the source causal

Current Study

Imagine a rock shooting out of a cannon into a lake

We are more likely to encode an object as an agent if it causes motion (Dowty, 1991)

Causal Events

Familiarization trials:◦ Duck alone 2x

◦ Plane alone 2x

◦ Objects 4x

Experiment 2 - Causaln = 12; Average Age = 16;1

Experiment 2 – Test TrialsPresented sequentially

Pair A Pair B Pair C

Experiment 2 - Results

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

35

40

Goal

Source

Ave

rage

Loo

king

Tim

e

p < .05

The goal bias persisted despite our manipulations.

The goal bias is robust!

Experiment 2 - Findings

This robust goal bias in infants may have a connection to the goal bias seen in the language of adults and children

Low level constraints – our cognition and processing may be constrained to processing motion events in this way

Overall Findings

Did the infants really perceive the events as causal in Experiment 2?

Experiment 3:◦ Sources are ordinary◦ Baseline study – did our manipulations in the previous studies

decrease the goal bias?

Experiment 4:◦ Change features of objects, not goals or sources◦ Would making the objects (duck in previous study) inanimate

(ex: tissue or balloon) manipulate the goal bias?◦ Past research: some inanimate events lead to a slight source

bias (Lakusta & Carey, 2013)

Future Questions

Thank you for coming, and thank you toall of our research participants!