will the goal always win?
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Will The Goal Always Win? . Megan Sommer Jessica Bury, Inae Colucio , Katie Wiseman, & Laura Lakusta. Adult Preferences. Familiar faces vs. unfamiliar faces (Park, 2010). Infant Preferences. Prefer patterns over plain color ( Mauer & Mauer , 1988) Prefer high contrast colors like - PowerPoint PPT PresentationTRANSCRIPT
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!