Inferring the goals of a nonhuman agent

Johnson, Slaughter, and Carey [Dev. Sci. 1 (1998) 233.] used infants' ability to follow the 'gaze' of novel objects to claim that infants' recognition of mentalistic agents is not isomorphic with person recognition but rather based on a set of nonarbitrary object recognition cues including the presence of a face and the ability to interact contingently with other agents. The current studies extend these findings with data based on infant imitation and the production of communicative gestures. The first study replicated Meltzoff's [Dev. Psychol. 31 (1995) 838.] reenactment of goals paradigm with a novel, nonhuman agent. Fifteen-month-olds were found to reenact both the completed and uncompleted/unseen goals of a novel object that had a face and interacted contingently with the experimenter and infant. Concurrently, infants directed many communicative gestures at the object. A second study excluded the possibility that the communicative gestures apparently directed at the object in Study 1 were in fact imitations of the experimenter's own behavior. The suggestion that novel, nonhuman objects are capable of eliciting such divergent behaviors as gaze-following, goal reenactment, and communicative gestures from infants, supports the claim that all of these behaviors are mediated by a central conceptual notion of mentalistic being, at least by the ages studied, and that that concept is not isomorphic with the concept person. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.