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Welcome to the nexus of ethics, psychology, morality, technology, health care, and philosophy
Showing posts with label Infants. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Infants. Show all posts

Wednesday, November 24, 2021

Moral masters or moral apprentices? A connectionist account of sociomoral evaluation in preverbal infants

Benton, D. T., & Lapan, C. 
(2021, February 21). 
https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/mnh35

Abstract

Numerous studies suggest that preverbal infants possess the ability to make sociomoral judgements and demonstrate a preference for prosocial agents. Some theorists argue that infants possess an “innate moral core” that guides their sociomoral reasoning. However, we propose that infants’ capacity for putative sociomoral evaluation and reasoning can just as likely be driven by a domain-general associative-learning mechanism that is sensitive to agent action. We implement this theoretical account in a connectionist computational model and show that it can account for the pattern of results in Hamlin et al. (2007), Hamlin and Wynn (2011), Hamlin (2013), and Hamlin, Wynn, Bloom, and Mahajan (2011). These are pioneering studies in this area and were among the first to examine sociomoral evaluation in preverbal infants. Based on the results of 5 computer simulations, we suggest that an associative-learning mechanism—instantiated as a computational (connectionist) model—can account for previous findings on preverbal infants’ capacity for sociomoral evaluation. These results suggest that an innate moral core may not be necessary to account for sociomoral evaluation in infants.

From the General Discussion

The simulations suggest the preverbal infants’ reliable choice of helpers over hinderers inHamlin et al. (2007), Hamlin and Wynn (2011), Hamlin (2013), and Hamlin et al. (2011) could have been based on extensive real-world experience with various kinds of actions (e.g., concordant action and discordant action) and an expectation—based on a learned second-order correlation—that agents that engage in certain kinds of actions (e.g., concordant action) have the capacity for interaction, whereas agents that engage in certain kinds of other actions (e.g., discordant action) either do not have the capacity for interaction or have less of a capacity for it. 

Broadly, these results are consistent with work by Powell and Spelke (2018). They found that 4- to 5½-month-old infants looked longer at characters that engaged in concordant (i.e., imitative) action with other characters than characters that engaged in discordant (i.e., non-imitative) action with other characters (Exps. 1 and 2). Specifically, infants looked longer at characters that engaged in the same jumping motion and made the same sound as a target character than those characters that engaged in the same jumping motion but made a different sound than the target character. Our results are also consistent with their finding—which was based on a conceptual replication of Hamlin et al. (2007)—that 12-month-olds reliably reached for a character that engaged in concordant (i.e., imitative) action with the climber than a character that engaged in discordant (i.e., non-imitative) action with it (Exp. 4), even when those actions were non-social. 

Tuesday, March 11, 2014

Friend or Foe? Early Social Evaluation of Human Interactions

Buon M, Jacob P, Margules S, Brunet I, Dutat M, et al. (2014) Friend or Foe? Early Social Evaluation of Human Interactions. PLoS ONE 9(2): e88612. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0088612

Abstract

We report evidence that 29-month-old toddlers and 10-month-old preverbal infants discriminate between two agents: a pro-social agent, who performs a positive (comforting) action on a human patient and a negative (harmful) action on an inanimate object, and an anti-social agent, who does the converse. The evidence shows that they prefer the former to the latter even though the agents perform the same bodily movements. Given that humans can cause physical harm to their conspecifics, we discuss this finding in light of the likely adaptive value of the ability to detect harmful human agents.

The entire article is here.