{"pk":27281,"title":"Inferring Intentional Agents From Violation of Randomness","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Humans have a strong “cognitive compulsion” to infer in-tentional agents from violation of randomness and such anagency–nonrandomness link emerges early in development.In two studies, we directly quantified, formalized, and com-pared both ends of this link for the first time. In Experiment1, two groups of participants viewed the same 256 binary se-quences (e.g., AABAAABA) and classified each as generatedby agents/non-agents or by nonrandom/random processes. Wefound a strong correlation between two judgments: sequencesviewed as more agentive also tended to be judged as less ran-dom. In Experiment 2, another two groups were asked toproduce sequences that others might appreciate as agentive ornonrandom. Participant-generated sequences in the two con-ditions had a substantial overlap, indicating common guidingprinciples of agency and nonrandomness generation. Taken to-gether, the present studies provide evidence for a shared cog-nitive basis of agency detection and subjective randomness.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"agency; subjective randomness; agency–nonrandomness link; animate-inanimate distinction"}],"section":"Posters: Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4pb9s57j","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Yuan","middle_name":"","last_name":"Meng","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of California, Berkeley","department":""},{"first_name":"Thomas","middle_name":"L.","last_name":"Griffiths","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of California, Berkeley","department":""},{"first_name":"Fei","middle_name":"","last_name":"Xu","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of California, Berkeley","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2017-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/27281/galley/16917/download/"}]}