Previous research has established that goal tracking emerges early in the first year of life and rapidly becomes increasingly sophisticated. However, it has not yet been shown whether young children continue to update their representations of others’ goals over time. The current study investigated this by probing young children’s (24- to 30-month-olds; N = 24) ability to differentiate between goal-directed actions that have been halted because the goal was interrupted and those that have been halted because the goal was abandoned. To test whether children are sensitive to this distinction, we manipulated the experimenter’s reason for not completing a goal-directed action; his initial goal was either interrupted by an obstacle or abandoned in favor of an alternative. We measured whether children’s helping behavior was sensitive to the experimenter’s reason for not completing his goal-directed action by recording whether children completed the experimenter’s initial goal or the alternative goal. The results showed that children helped to complete the experimenter’s initial goal significantly more often after this goal had been interrupted than after it had been abandoned. These results support the hypothesis that children continue to update their representations of others’ goals over time by 2 years of age and specifically that they differentiate between abandoned and interrupted goals.

先前的研究已经确定，目标跟踪出现在生命的第一年的早期，并迅速变得越来越复杂。然而，还没有表明随着时间的推移，幼儿是否会继续更新他们对他人目标的表述。当前的研究通过探究幼儿（24 至 30 个月大；N = 24) 区分因目标被中断而停止的目标导向行动和因目标被放弃而停止的行动的能力。为了测试孩子们是否对这种区别敏感，我们操纵了实验者没有完成目标导向行动的原因；他最初的目标要么被障碍打断，要么被放弃，转而寻求替代方案。我们通过记录儿童是否完成了实验者的初始目标或替代目标来衡量儿童的帮助行为是否对实验者未完成其目标导向行动的原因敏感。结果表明，与放弃目标相比，儿童在中断目标后帮助完成实验者初始目标的频率明显更高。