Loading...
Stopping at nothing: Two-year-olds differentiate between interrupted and abandoned goals
Editors
Title / Series / Name
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
Publication Volume
209
Publication Issue
Pages
Editors
Keywords
Goal attribution
Social cognition
Instrumental helping
Prosociality
Sociocognitive development
Goal tracking
Social cognition
Instrumental helping
Prosociality
Sociocognitive development
Goal tracking
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14018/13887
Abstract
Previous research has established that goal tracking emerges early in the first year of life and rapidly becomes increasingly sophisticated. However, it has not yet been shown whether young children continue to update their representations of others’ goals over time. The current study investigated this by probing young children’s (24- to 30-month-olds; N = 24) ability to differentiate between goal-directed actions that have been halted because the goal was interrupted and those that have been halted because the goal was abandoned. To test whether children are sensitive to this distinction, we manipulated the experimenter’s reason for not completing a goal-directed action; his initial goal was either interrupted by an obstacle or abandoned in favor of an alternative. We measured whether children’s helping behavior was sensitive to the experimenter’s reason for not completing his goal-directed action by recording whether children completed the experimenter’s initial goal or the alternative goal. The results showed that children helped to complete the experimenter’s initial goal significantly more often after this goal had been interrupted than after it had been abandoned. These results support the hypothesis that children continue to update their representations of others’ goals over time by 2 years of age and specifically that they differentiate between abandoned and interrupted goals.
Topic
Publisher
Place of Publication
Type
Journal article
Date
2021
Language
ISBN
Identifiers
10.1016/j.jecp.2021.105171