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Infants attribute to agents goals and dispositions.

What do infants know about agents’ goals? We see this issue consisting of two closely related questions. First, what is an agent to infants? Second, how do infants attribute goals to agents? H&S focused on the second question. They discussed Luo and Baillargeon (2005) and stated that their study ‘falsifies’ L&B’s claims. While we view H&S’s answers to the second question as an interesting alternative, we feel that it is essential to consider both questions to paint a clear picture of early intentional understanding. Therefore, we present recent research built on L&B (2005) and reiterate our positions, to clarify that H&S’s results are indeed consistent with our claims. There is considerable evidence on infants’ understanding about agents’ goals (e.g. Gergely, N dasdy, Csibra & B r , 1995; Woodward, 1998), for example, the well-known ‘Woodward-effect’. L&B (2005) extended these results to situations involving a nonhuman agent. In the study, 5-month-old infants were given evidence that a self-propelled box was an agent. It first moved in the center area of an apparatus. Then, it changed its behavior and moved to a corner to contact object-A, while object-B was in the other corner (two-object condition) or absent (one-object condition). During test, both objects were present and their positions were reversed; the box contacted A or B. Infants looked longer when the box contacted B in the two-object but not in the one-object condition. These results suggested the following. Infants in the two-object condition attributed to the agent not only a goal (a state of affairs an agent wants to achieve) to approach and contact A, but also a preference for A over B (a dispositional state that explains why an agent chooses a particular goal-object in the presence of another option). Therefore, they expected the box to approach A during test and responded with heightened interest when B was approached. Conversely, although infants in the one-object condition attributed to the agent the goal of approaching object-A, this goalattribution was insufficient for infants to predict the agent’s actions when a new object, object-B, was introduced. They thus accepted that the agent could approach B. Luo (2011) extended these results to 3-month-olds. Infants also appeared to attribute dispositions to agents in the one-object conditions when additional behavioral information was provided. Three-month-olds did just that, if object-A occupied different positions and the box agent consistently adjusted its actions to approach object-A, demonstrating equifinality (Luo, 2011). Twelve-month-olds attribute to a human agent a disposition towards object-A when the agent consistently opens a container to grasp the object inside, demonstrating a means–end action, but not when the container is absent and the agent simply grasps the object (B r , Verschoor & Coenen, 2011), as in the one-object conditions. We have argued that an agent, human or nonhuman, can perceive its environment and exert control over its actions. Two behavioral cues, changes in behavior (Luo & Baillargeon, 2005) and equafinality (Csibra, 2008), convey an impression of ‘free-will’ that signals to infants the presence of an agent (B r & Leslie, 2007). Once an agent is identified, infants expect it to act in pursuit of goals (e.g. Leslie, 1995). This is why a simple action of a person grasping a single object is goal-directed, as also noted by H&S, and why L&B suggested that the box’s actions in the one-object conditions were goal-directed. However, whether infants can make predictions about agents’ behavior and what sort of predictions they make depend on the specific situations (for discussions on disposition-attributions being a more powerful predictor of agents’ actions than goal-attributions, see Luo & Beck, 2010). H&S disagreed on our interpretation of the one-object condition null results. They discussed three cues for infants to encode agents’ goals. The first is ‘the selectivity of the action’ in the ‘Woodward-effect’, which suggests preferences. The second cue is varied persistence, as in H&S when the agent persistently approached its target through different routes (similar to equifinality, a cue, we believe, to agency and attributions of goals and dispositions). The third cue is efficiency (a cue, we believe, to goals ⁄ dispositions-attributions), which was only present