Will The Goal Always Win?

1. Will The Goal Always Win? Megan Sommer Jessica Bury, InaeColucio, Katie Wiseman, & Laura Lakusta

2. Adult Preferences • Familiar faces vs. unfamiliar faces (Park, 2010)

3. Infant Preferences • Prefer patterns over plain color (Mauer & Mauer, 1988) • Prefer high contrast colors like black and white checkerboard over gray (Banks & Dannemiller, 1987) • Infants prefer end points over starting points (Lakusta et al., 2007)

4. End Points & Starting Points End Point (Goal) Starting Point (Source)

5. Goal Bias • 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)

6. Current Study • 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

7. Method – Experiment 1 & 2 • 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

8. Experiment 1 – Physically Salientn = 13; Average Age = 16;7 • Familiarization trials: • Duck alone 2x • Plane alone 2x • Objects 4x

9. Experiment 1 – Test TrialsPresented sequentially Pair A Pair B Pair C

10. Experiment 1 - Results p < .05

11. Experiment 1 - Findings • Infants still look longer at and have a preference for goals over sources despite our manipulations. • The goal bias is robust!

12. Current Study • 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

13. Causal Events • 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)

15. Experiment 2 - Causaln = 12; Average Age = 16;1 • Familiarization trials: • Duck alone 2x • Plane alone 2x • Objects 4x

16. Experiment 2 – Test TrialsPresented sequentially Pair A Pair B Pair C

17. Experiment 2 - Results p < .05

18. Experiment 2 - Findings • The goal bias persisted despite our manipulations. • The goal bias is robust!

19. Overall 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

20. Future Questions • 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)

21. Thank you for coming, and thank you to all of our research participants!