TY - GEN
T1 - Inferring Intentional Agents From Violation of Randomness
AU - Meng, Yuan
AU - Griffiths, Thomas L.
AU - Xu, Fei
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© CogSci 2017.
PY - 2017
Y1 - 2017
N2 - Humans have a strong “cognitive compulsion” to infer intentional agents from violation of randomness and such an agency-nonrandomness link emerges early in development. In two studies, we directly quantified, formalized, and compared both ends of this link for the first time. In Experiment 1, two groups of participants viewed the same 256 binary sequences (e.g., AABAAABA) and classified each as generated by agents/non-agents or by nonrandom/random processes. We found a strong correlation between two judgments: sequences viewed as more agentive also tended to be judged as less random. In Experiment 2, another two groups were asked to produce sequences that others might appreciate as agentive or nonrandom. Participant-generated sequences in the two conditions had a substantial overlap, indicating common guiding principles of agency and nonrandomness generation. Taken together, the present studies provide evidence for a shared cognitive basis of agency detection and subjective randomness.
AB - Humans have a strong “cognitive compulsion” to infer intentional agents from violation of randomness and such an agency-nonrandomness link emerges early in development. In two studies, we directly quantified, formalized, and compared both ends of this link for the first time. In Experiment 1, two groups of participants viewed the same 256 binary sequences (e.g., AABAAABA) and classified each as generated by agents/non-agents or by nonrandom/random processes. We found a strong correlation between two judgments: sequences viewed as more agentive also tended to be judged as less random. In Experiment 2, another two groups were asked to produce sequences that others might appreciate as agentive or nonrandom. Participant-generated sequences in the two conditions had a substantial overlap, indicating common guiding principles of agency and nonrandomness generation. Taken together, the present studies provide evidence for a shared cognitive basis of agency detection and subjective randomness.
KW - agency
KW - agency-nonrandomness link
KW - animate-inanimate distinction
KW - subjective randomness
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M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85139552563
T3 - CogSci 2017 - Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Computational Foundations of Cognition
SP - 2699
EP - 2704
BT - CogSci 2017 - Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society
PB - The Cognitive Science Society
T2 - 39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Computational Foundations of Cognition, CogSci 2017
Y2 - 26 July 2017 through 29 July 2017
ER -