Average rating
Cast your vote
You can rate an item by clicking the amount of stars they wish to award to this item.
When enough users have cast their vote on this item, the average rating will also be shown.
Star rating
Your vote was cast
Thank you for your feedback
Thank you for your feedback
Publisher
Nature Publishing groupType
Journal articleTitle / Series / Name
Nature CommunicationsPublication Volume
11Date
2020
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
When perceptually available information is scant, we can leverage logical connections among hypotheses to draw reliable conclusions that guide our reasoning and learning. We investigate whether this function of logical reasoning is present in infancy and aid understanding and learning about the social environment. In our task, infants watch reaching actions directed toward a hidden object whose identity is ambiguous between two alternatives and has to be inferred by elimination. Here we show that infants apply a disjunctive inference to identify the hidden object and use this logical conclusion to assess the consistency of the actions with a preference previously demonstrated by the agent and, importantly, also to acquire new knowledge regarding the preferences of the observed actor. These findings suggest that, early in life, preverbal logical reasoning functions as a reliable source of evidence that can support learning by offering a logical route for knowledge acquisition.Publisher link
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19734-5identifiers
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-19734-5ae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-19734-5
Scopus Count
Collections