Intentionality

Two Contrasting Views of Intentional Understanding

The centrality of intentionality to social perception prompts the view that perhaps inferences about intentions are innate and modular, triggered in the presence of self-propelled movement. Fritz Heider’s seminal work in the 1940s suggesting that adults perceive intentionality effortlessly, even in the simple movements of inanimate geometric shapes, certainly fuels this hypothesis. In this view, then, perception of intentionality should be developmentally privileged, with evidence of intentional inferences apparent early in infancy.

An altogether different view, however, posits that intentional understanding is constructed only gradually through development as contextual knowledge about the social world builds and as other domain general facets of cognition mature. In this view, intentionality inferences are often conceptually complex. For example, in judging whether an action is intentional, adults appear to rely on the presence of at least five components. Specifically, the actor must hold (a) a desire to perform the action, (b) a belief that the action will bring about the desired outcome, (c) an intention to perform the action, (d) some level of awareness of performing the action, and (e) the skill required to successfully perform the action. Proponents of this view find it implausible that young infants have the cognitive capacity to undertake an analysis of such complexity. Of course, hybrid views are also possible: Perhaps some sensitivity to the intentionality of simple movements is built in or acquired very early, with a full-blown appreciation of more complex intentional phenomena acquired only later as cognition advances.

Development of Intentional Understanding in Infancy and Childhood

What then does the developmental evidence show? Jean Piaget’s classic work in the 1930s was initially highly influential. His studies suggested that it was not until 8 or 9 years of age that children began to recognize the role of intentions in moral judgment. Instead, younger children’s moral reasoning was largely driven by the seriousness of outcomes. Subsequent critics noted, however, that children might well appreciate something about intentionality without fully understanding its relevance to moral reasoning. Indeed, even in the moral domain, more recent research indicates that, when the severity of the outcome is held constant, young preschool children take intentions into account in making judgments of praise and blame.

From the 1990s onward, attention has increasingly turned to whether young infants are sensitive to intentionality. The evidence suggests that they are: In the first year of life infants discriminate animate from inanimate motion; they pay attention to changes in an actor’s goals when the actor is reaching for something; and they expect actions to be carried out in a direct, efficient manner. Toward the end of the first year, they become sensitive to intentional relations at a distance, such as those involving looking and pointing, as well as to those involving simple tool use; and they appear to parse the stream of action into hierarchical, intention-relevant units. Further evidence of intentional understanding emerges by 18 months of age when infants imitate intentional but not accidental actions, and when they begin to reference desire and goal states in their natural language. Finally, 2-year-olds begin to appropriately explain actions in terms of desires and, conversely, predict actions from desires.

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