Origins of Social Intelligence in Human Infants

Every day, we reason about people both as agents with intentions and goals, and as physical bodies navigating a physical environment. My research program investigates the origins of these abilities in human infants, and aims to describe these origins in engineering-specific terms. I ask: What are the representations and computations that support infants’ understanding of other people and their actions? In this talk, I will present evidence that when infants observe other agents act, they appreciate that agents seek to minimize the cost of their actions, trade off the cost of acting against the rewards actions bring, and act so as to cause changes in the world. Furthermore, infants flexibly apply this reasoning to agents that are unfamiliar to them, and even to actions that they themselves are incapable of performing. I will end by speculating about what this tells us, more broadly, about the origins of the human mind.