Infants and toddlers leverage their understanding of action goals to evaluate agents who help others
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Why do infants and toddlers prefer helpers? Four experiments (conducted from 2019-2022; n = 136, 66% White, 15% Asian, 4% Black, 2% Hispanic/Latino, 13% multiracial, majority USA) investigated whether infants and toddlers favor agents whose actions allow others to achieve their goals. In the key experiment, 8-month-old infants and 15-month-old toddlers viewed a protagonist who tried and failed to open a box that contained a toy while two other agents (helpers) observed; then the toys were exchanged and the helpers opened different boxes. Infants and toddlers differently evaluated the two helpers, consistent with their developing means-end understanding. Together, the present four experiments connect infants' and toddlers' evaluations of helping to their understanding of goal-directed behavior.
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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) | 0.001 | 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".