Precursors of logical reasoning in preverbal human infants

Infants are able to entertain hypotheses about complex events and to modify them rationally when faced with inconsistent evidence. These capacities suggest that infants can use elementary logical representations to frame and prune hypotheses. By presenting scenes containing ambiguities about the ide...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science) 2018-03, Vol.359 (6381), p.1263-1266
Main Authors: Cesana-Arlotti, Nicoló, Martín, Ana, Téglás, Ernő, Vorobyova, Liza, Cetnarski, Ryszard, Bonatti, Luca L
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Child Development
Cognition & reasoning
Concept Formation - physiology
Deduction
Eye (anatomy)
Eye Movements
Human behavior
Humans
Infant
Infants
Inferences
Problem Solving - physiology
Pupils
Young Children
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Summary:Infants are able to entertain hypotheses about complex events and to modify them rationally when faced with inconsistent evidence. These capacities suggest that infants can use elementary logical representations to frame and prune hypotheses. By presenting scenes containing ambiguities about the identity of an object, here we show that 12- and 19-month-old infants look longer at outcomes that are inconsistent with a logical inference necessary to resolve such ambiguities. At the moment of a potential deduction, infants' pupils dilated, and their eyes moved toward the ambiguous object when inferences could be computed, in contrast to transparent scenes not requiring inferences to identify the object. These oculomotor markers resembled those of adults inspecting similar scenes, suggesting that intuitive and stable logical structures involved in the interpretation of dynamic scenes may be part of the fabric of the human mind.
ISSN:0036-8075
1095-9203
DOI:10.1126/science.aao3539