Evaluating actions: Do young children prefer actions completed efficiently over those completed inefficiently?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Efficiency informs perceptions and expectations of people’s actions from early in life. We examined whether young children aged three and four consider efficiency when evaluating how well agents completed goals. In three experiments, we showed children scenarios where two characters each walked to target objects, and then asked children which character did a better job. In the first experiment, children appeared to consider efficiency. They more often chose a character who took a direct path over one who took an indirect path, but only when the latter character could have taken a shorter path. Two follow-up experiments, though, failed to replicate this pattern and the success in the initial experiment could be explained in terms of the features of the paths (not strictly related to efficiency) used in that experiment. The findings suggest, then, that three- and four-year-olds do not yet use efficiency to normatively evaluate actions. We consider two alternative explanations for this.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.012 | 0.028 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.027 | 0.014 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".