my neighbor children’s perception of agency in interaction with an imaginary agent我的邻居孩子的感知与一个虚构的代理机构的交互.pdfVIP

My Neighbor: Children’s Perception of Agency in Interaction with an Imaginary Agent Yusuke Moriguchi1,2*, Ikuko Shinohara3 1 Department of School Education, Joetsu University of Education, Joetsu, Japan, 2 Precursory Research for Embryonic Science and Technology, Japan Science and Technology Agency, Tokyo, Japan, 3 Department of Psychology, Aichi Shukutoku University, Nagakute, Japan Abstract Children may treat an invisible entity as a live and thinking entity, known as an imaginary companion (IC). Some researchers suggest that this is simply pretend play, but it is possible that children experience agency in their interactions with ICs. Given the literature on cognitive science and social brain research, we hypothesize that young children may have an agent- perception system that responds to an invisible agent by which they may experience realistic agency in their interactions with ICs. In this study, children were introduced to an invisible agent and an invisible stone. However, they assigned biological and psychological properties to the agent but not the stone. The tendency of assigning such properties was stronger in children with ICs than in those without ICs. These results contribute to our understanding of cognitive and neural development in typical and atypical children. Citation: Moriguchi Y, Shinohara I (2012) My Neighbor: Children’s Perception of Agency in Interaction with an Imaginary Agent. PLoS ONE 7(9): e44463. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0044463 Editor: Frank Krueger, George Mason University/Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study, United States of America Received May 27, 2012; Accepted August 2, 2012; Published September 7, 2012 Copyright: 2012 Moriguchi, Shinohara. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, w