Whom to ask for help? Children’s developing understanding of other people’s action capabilities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We often rely on other people's help to accomplish tasks and to attain goals. People, however, differ in their physical action capabilities. Some persons are therefore better able to provide help than others. We investigated 2.5-, 3.5-, and 5-year-old children's ability to take other person's action capabilities in a helping situation into account. To this end, they observed a protagonist who needed the help of friends to accomplish several tasks. For each task, two friends were available, but only one was physically able to provide the help. Children were asked to indicate, which partner the protagonist will ask for help. Our results showed a developmental effect with children in the older two groups performing significantly better than those in the youngest group. Additionally, we found evidence that the 5-year-olds outperformed the younger age groups in their ability to justify their choice. Our findings thus suggest that children's ability to consider others' physical action capabilities in helping situations develops around 3 years of age. The results are interpreted in terms of children's ability to perceive others' affordances. The implication of these findings for theories on the development of action understanding and joint action are discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".