Infants and toddlers leverage their understanding of action goals to evaluate agents who help others

Do infants and toddlers prefer actors who help others achieve their goals? To address this question, we focused on a developmental change in early action understanding. Eight-month-old infants and 15-month-old toddlers (n = 72, 44% female, 68% White) differently evaluated two agents who engaged in the same actions, showing opposite preferences, consistent with their developing means-end understanding. Moreover, 8-month-old infants (n = 64, 43% female, 63% White) correctly inferred an individual’s goal and valued the agent who fostered it when the means-end action was replaced by a superficially similar direct action. These findings, from experiments that controlled all social cues (including imitation, synchrony, and positive affect), show that infants’ evaluations depend, in part, on their understanding of goal-directed behavior.