Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

322 I HOW THE MIND WORKSromantic interest to foil a dastardly villain. Its stars are three dots. Onedot moves some distance up an inclined line, back down, and up again,until it is almost at the top. Another abruptly collides with it, and itmoves back down. A third gently touches it and moves together with it tothe top of the incline. It is impossible not to see the first dot as trying toget up the hill, the second as hindering it, and the third as helping itreach its goal.The social psychologists Fritz Heider and M. Simmel were the filmmakers.Together with many developmental psychologists, they concludethat people interpret certain motions not as special cases in their intuitivephysics (perhaps as weird springy objects) but as a different kind ofentity altogether. People construe certain objects as animate agents.Agents are recognized by their ability to violate intuitive physics by starting,stopping, swerving, or speeding up without an external nudge, especiallywhen they persistently approach or avoid some other object. Theagents are thought to have an internal and renewable source of energy,force, impetus, or oomph, which they use to propel themselves, usuallyin service of a goal.These agents are animals, of course, including humans. Science tellsus that they follow physical laws, just like everything else in the universe;it's just that the matter in motion consists of tiny little molecules in musclesand brains. But outside the neurophysiology lab ordinary thinkershave to assign them to a different category of uncaused causers.Infants divide the world into the animate and the inert early in life.Three-month-olds are upset by a face that suddenly goes still but not byan object that suddenly stops moving. They try to bring objects towardthem by pushing things, but try to bring people toward them by makingnoise. By six or seven months, babies distinguish between how hands actupon objects and how other objects act upon objects. They have oppositeexpectations about what makes people move and what makes objectsmove: objects launch each other by collisions; people start and stop ontheir own. By twelve months, babies interpret cartoons of moving dots asif the dots were seeking goals. For example, the babies are not surprisedwhen a dot that hops over a barrier on its way to another dot makes abeeline after the barrier is removed. Three-year-olds describe dot cartoonsmuch as we do, and have no trouble distinguishing things thatmove on their own, like animals, from things that don't, like dolls, statues,and lifelike animal figurines.Intuitions about self-propelled agents overlap with three other major