Goal Attribution toward Behavior of Artifacts in Humans

The paper investigates the effect of environmental context and attention on how humans attribute goals to the behavior of man-made objects. We presented participants with moving chair’s motion along a B-spline trajectory. We manipulated the context by whether an table was placed in the environement or not. We also investigated the effect of chair’s attention toward an object on goal attribution. The results indicates that existence of objects per se did not affect inferred goals. However, directing attention toward objects contributed to control the attributed goals which related to the object. These results also suggested that not only taking the intentional stance but also taking the design stance is effective to construe artifacts’ intention.