Reasoning about ‘irrational’ actions When intentional movements cannot be explained, the movements themselves are seen as the goal》.pdf

Cognition 129 (2013) 309–327 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Cognition journal homepage: www.else /locate/COGNIT Reasoning about ‘irrational’ actions: When intentional movements cannot be explained, the movements themselves are seen as the goal Adena Schachner ⇑, Susan Carey Laboratory for Developmental Studies, Department of Psychology, Harvard University, United States a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t Article history: Infants and adults are thought to infer the goals of observed actions by calculating the Received 12 June 2012 actions’ efficiency as a means to particular external effects, like reaching an object or loca- Revised 1 July 2013 tion. However, many intentional actions lack an external effect or external goal (e.g. dance). Accepted 11 July 2013 We show that for these actions, adults infer that the agents’ goal is to produce the move- Available online 17 August 2013 ments themselves: Movements are seen as the intended outcome, not just a means to an end. We test what drives observers to infer such movement-based goals, hypothesizing Keywords: that observers infer movement-based goals to explain actions that are clearly intentional, Action understanding but are not an efficient means to any plausible external goal. In three experiments, we sep- Explanation Bayesian inference