Computing Efficiency in Infancy

What assumptions constrain our hypotheses about the causes of others’ actions? Previous empirical work suggests that one key expectation present in infancy is the principle of efficiency -- infants expect rational agents minimize cost as they pursue goals. This line of work focuses on two broad questions. First, do parameterized notions of cost underly these early action representations? Second, how does the principle of efficiency support social inference, prediction, and evaluation?