The influence of movement and outcome on young children's attributions of intention

Two studies investigated preschoolers' ability to infer an actor's intended goal based upon the perceptual properties of the actor's movement. Scenes were presented showing a computer-generated display in which a circle persistently jumped and rebounded off wall. One of three outcomes occurred: the acting circle reached its target, it reached an outcome opposite the target of its persistent movement (non-goal condition), or it reached neither target. Children accurately inferred the acting circle's goal in Expt 1 except for the S-year-olds in the non-goal condition. Experiment 2 modified the non-goal condition so that the passive movements were not increasingly closer to the non-goal, resulting in above-chance performance for both age groups ( p < .01). Taken together, these findings suggest that by age 3 children will account for how an actor is moving when identifying its intended goal and will then distinguish the inferred goal from the eventual outcome of the act. Implications of these findings for the relation between outward features of motion and the development of mental concepts are discussed.