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1. Infants rationally infer the goals of other people's reaches in the absence of first‐person experience with reaching actions

   https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.13453  

   Woo, Brandon M. ; Liu, Shari ; Spelke, Elizabeth S. ( November 2023 , Developmental Science)

   Does knowledge of other people's minds grow from concrete experience to abstract concepts? Cognitive scientists have hypothesized that infants’ first‐person experience, acting on their own goals, leads them to understand others’ actions and goals. Indeed, classic developmental research suggests that before infants reach for objects, they do not see others’ reaches as goal‐directed. In five experiments (N = 117), we test an alternative hypothesis: Young infants view reaching as undertaken for a purpose but are open‐minded about the specific goals that reaching actions are aimed to achieve. We first show that 3‐month‐old infants, who cannot reach for objects, lack the expectation that observed acts of reaching will be directed to objects rather than to places. Infants at the same age learned rapidly, however, that a specific agent's reaching action was directed either to an object or to a place, after seeing the agent reach for the same object regardless of where it was, or to the same place regardless of what was there. In a further experiment, 3‐month‐old infants did not demonstrate such inferences when they observed an actor engaging in passive movements. Thus, before infants have learned to reach and manipulate objects themselves, they infer that reaching actions are goal‐directed, and they are open to learning that the goal of an action is either an object or a place.

   In the present experiments, 3‐month‐old prereaching infants learned to attribute either object goals or place goals to other people's reaching actions.

   Prereaching infants view agents’ actions as goal‐directed, but do not expect these acts to be directed to specific objects, rather than to specific places.

   Prereaching infants are open‐minded about the specific goal states that reaching actions aim to achieve.

    

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2. Building representations of the social world: Children extract patterns from social choices to reason about multi‐group hierarchies

   https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.13366  

   Heck, Isobel A. ; Kushnir, Tamar ; Kinzler, Katherine D. ( February 2023 , Developmental Science)

   How do children learn about the structure of the social world? We tested whether children would extract patterns from an agent's social choices to make inferences about multiple groups’ relative social standing. In Experiment 1, 4‐ to 6‐year‐old children (N = 36; tested in Central New York) saw an agent and three groups (Group‐A,Group‐B, andGroup‐C) and observed the agent choose between pairs of individuals from different groups. Across pairwise selections, a pattern emerged: The agent chose individuals fromGroup‐A > Group‐B > Group‐C. Children tracked the agent's choices to predict thatGroup‐Awas “most‐preferred” and the “leader” and thatGroup‐Cwas “least‐preferred” and the “helper.” In Experiments 2 and 3, we examined children's reasoning about a more complex pattern involving four groups and tested a wider age range. In Experiment 2, 5‐ to 10‐year‐old children (N = 98; tested in Central New York) used the agent's pattern of pairwise choices to infer that the agent likedGroup‐A > Group‐B > Group‐C > Group‐Dand to make predictions about which groups were likely to be “leaders” and “helpers.” In Experiment 3, we found evidence for social specificity in children's reasoning: 5‐ to 10‐year‐old children (N = 96; from 26 US States) made inferences about groups’ relativesocialbut notphysicalpower from the agent's pattern of affiliative choices across the four groups. These findings showcase a mechanism through which children may learn about societal‐level hierarchies through the patterns they observe over time in people's group‐based social choices.

   Children in our sample extracted patterns from an agent's positive social choices between multiple groups to reason about groups’ relative social standing.

   Children used the pattern of an agent's positive social choices to guide their reasoning about which groups were likely to be “leaders” and “helpers” in a fictional town.

   The pattern that emerged in an agent's choices of friends shaped children's thinking about groups’ relativesocialbut notphysicalpower.

   Children tracked social choices to reason about group‐based hierarchies at the individual level (which groups an agent prefers) and societal level (which groups are privileged).

    

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3. Planning with Participation Constraints

   https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v36i5.20462  

   Zhang, Hanrui ; Cheng, Yu ; Conitzer, Vincent ( June 2022 , Proceedings of the 36th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence)

   We pose and study the problem of planning in Markov decision processes (MDPs), subject to participation constraints as studied in mechanism design. In this problem, a planner must work with a self-interested agent on a given MDP. Each action in the MDP provides an immediate reward to the planner and a (possibly different) reward to the agent. The agent has no control in choosing the actions, but has the option to end the entire process at any time. The goal of the planner is to find a policy that maximizes her cumulative reward, taking into consideration the agent's ability to terminate. We give a fully polynomial-time approximation scheme for this problem. En route, we present polynomial-time algorithms for computing (exact) optimal policies for important special cases of this problem, including when the time horizon is constant, or when the MDP exhibits a "definitive decisions" property. We illustrate our algorithms with two different game-theoretic applications: the problem of assigning rides in ride-sharing and the problem of designing screening policies. Our results imply efficient algorithms for computing (approximately) optimal policies in both applications. 

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4. How children learn to transcend limits: Developmental pathways to possibility beliefs

   https://doi.org/10.1177/27538699231182371  

   Kushnir, Tamar ( June 2023 , Possibility Studies & Society)

   This review presents a theoretical account of the development of possibility beliefs in childhood through two developmental pathways, centered around the experience and understanding of our intentional, goal-directed actions. Pathway 1 (Naïve Optimism to Calibrated Realism) can be seen as early as the first year, as increased coordination of action through motor experience leads infants to a graded notion of what is possible and how much effort is required to achieve goals. Infants also incorporate social information into their earliest possibility beliefs, referencing caregivers to guide them in uncertain situations and learning from role models to effectively calibrate effort. Pathway 2 (Naïve Pessimism to Creative Transcendence) emerges from ages 4 to 7. At first, preschoolers correctly distinguish possible and impossible actions but are overly pessimistic about limits on possibility. With age, children use their imaginations to overcome hypothetical limits. This account suggests that realistic beliefs about what we can possibly do are in place in early childhood, preceding later developmental milestones in self-concept, identity, self-efficacy, achievement-orientation, and self-goals. This leaves open questions about mechanisms of change, how possibility beliefs contribute to later self-beliefs, and whether interventions that combine action experience with creative idea generation can increase the sense of the possible in children and adults.

    

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5. The rational use of causal inference to guide reinforcement learning strengthens with age

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s41539-020-00075-3  

   Cohen, Alexandra O. ; Nussenbaum, Kate ; Dorfman, Hayley M. ; Gershman, Samuel J. ; Hartley, Catherine A. ( October 2020 , npj Science of Learning)

   Beliefs about the controllability of positive or negative events in the environment can shape learning throughout the lifespan. Previous research has shown that adults’ learning is modulated by beliefs about the causal structure of the environment such that they update their value estimates to a lesser extent when the outcomes can be attributed to hidden causes. This study examined whether external causes similarly influenced outcome attributions and learning across development. Ninety participants, ages 7 to 25 years, completed a reinforcement learning task in which they chose between two options with fixed reward probabilities. Choices were made in three distinct environments in which different hidden agents occasionally intervened to generate positive, negative, or random outcomes. Participants’ beliefs about hidden-agent intervention aligned with the true probabilities of the positive, negative, or random outcome manipulation in each of the three environments. Computational modeling of the learning data revealed that while the choices made by both adults (ages 18–25) and adolescents (ages 13–17) were best fit by Bayesian reinforcement learning models that incorporate beliefs about hidden-agent intervention, those of children (ages 7–12) were best fit by a one learning rate model that updates value estimates based on choice outcomes alone. Together, these results suggest that while children demonstrate explicit awareness of the causal structure of the task environment, they do not implicitly use beliefs about the causal structure of the environment to guide reinforcement learning in the same manner as adolescents and adults.

    

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