3. Analysis resources of database

level; the highest risk region gets level 9 and the lowest gets level 1, based on the

Pareto ranking is a method for ordering cases on multiple criteria that has become popular in the context of genetic algorithms, where it is particularly valued because it often gives high rankings to those cases that only score heavily on one factor [13]. PR analysis is based on the principle of Pareto optimality. "Pareto optimality" is a formally defined concept used to determine when an allocation is optimal. An allocation is not Pareto optimal if there is an alternative allocation where improvements can be made to at least one participant's well-being without reducing any other participant's well-being. When no further Pareto improvements are possible, the allocation is a "Pareto optimum." A primary factor is selected from each vulnerability indicator. As shown in Figure 2, each point represents a grade of factor 1 and factor 2. If there is no point staying in the first quadrant, and there is no point ranked as high vulnerability degree. By taking same grade range region as a degree and following up the same step, this study can show each region's vulnera-

where Xi is the different indicators' data; M is the average grade, S is the

=ð Þ N � 1

ffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi

r� �

Σð Þ Xi � M 2

z‐score ¼ ð Þ Xi � M =S (2)

, and N is the number of data

principle to do PR analysis and evaluate each regional vulnerability.

Geographic Information Systems and Science

bility distribution.

standard deviation, S ¼

Figure 2.

62

Concept of PR analysis.

#### 3.1 General introduction of study area

According to the CGS disclosed geological drilling database, the Yunlin and Chiayi areas have relatively complete drilling data and complicated geographical environment. The area of environmental sensitive areas in Chiayi area of Yunlin is as high as 57%.

The strata along the western coast of Taiwan, especially the Chiayi area of Yunlin, are mostly modern alluvial strata. Because of their unconsolidated strata, the soil layers are mostly interbedded layers of sand and clay. In the past, soil liquefaction took place in sites containing particles with a diameter of about 0.01-cm loose fine sand-based and high groundwater level characteristics of the soil. Therefore, this study focuses on the Yushe River alluvial fan plain in Yunlin County, Chiayi County in the Chia-Nan Plain, the grid scale is 100 100 m, as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3. Study area—the plate area in Yunlin and Chiayi.


**Author details**

Monica Marc1,2\*, Ana Adriana Trusculescu1,3, Estera Boeriu4 and Diana Manolescu1,5

1 Center for Research and Innovation in Personalized Medicine of Respiratory Diseases, XIII Department—Pulmonology Discipline, "Victor Babes" University of Medicine and Pharmacy, Timisoara, Romania

2 II Clinic of Pulmonary Diseases, Clinical Hospital of Infectious Diseases and Pneumophtisiology "Dr. Victor Babes", Timisoara, Romania

3 Rehabilitation Clinic of Pulmonary Diseases, Clinical Hospital of Infectious Diseases and Pneumophtisiology "Dr. Victor Babes", Timisoara, Romania

4 Department of Pediatrics, "Victor Babes" University of Medicine and Pharmacy Timisoara, Timișoara, Romania

5 Department of Radiology and Medical Imaging, Clinical Hospital of Infectious Diseases and Pneumophtisiology "Dr. Victor Babes", Timisoara, Romania

\*Address all correspondence to<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
© 2023 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.


non-social in the current study by eliminating the protagonist from the event, thereby avoiding any interpretation of the events in terms of a social interaction or disposition. If infants' agent individuation is driven by differences in motion and first-order goals, then we should observe a pattern of results similar to those in Experiment 1.

# EXPERIMENT 3

# Participants

Sixteen 11-month-old infants (8 females) participated in this experiment (M = 11 months, 10 days, SD = 4 days). All infants were recruited from the Amherst, Massachusetts area, with approval from the University's Institutional Review Board, and written informed consent obtained from the parents. Three additional infants participated but were excluded from analysis because of fussiness (2) and experimental error (1).

# Materials, Design, and Procedure

The materials and design of the third experiment was the same for that of Experiment 1, except that in the Familiarization and Test Trials the Protagonist (the cow) and the cubes inside the box were removed from the show. The pattern of motion of both the Opening and the Closing actions was the same as the pattern of motion used in the Helping and Hindering events in the previous two experiments. During Opening trials, the Pig puppet jumped on the frontal right corner of the box, pulling up the lid completely backward. During Closing events, the Pig puppet grabbed the lid to close the box in a forward movement. A pause of about 6 s was used between both actions. The inter-observer agreement of this experiment was high (r = 0.96).

# Results

Preliminary analyses found no main effects for sex, Outcome Order (1 object or 2 objects first) or Trial Order (Opening first or Closing first); therefore, these variables were collapsed in subsequent analyses. A 2 (Object Outcome: 1 or 2 objects) × 2 (Trial Type: baseline or test) repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) yielded no significant main effect for Object Outcome, F(1, 15) = 0.02, p = 0.9, η 2p < 0.01, and Trial Type, F(1, 15) = 1.57, p = 0.23, η 2p = 0.09, nor any significant interaction between Object Outcome and Trial Type, F(1, 15) = 0.13, p = 0.72, η 2p < 0.01. Infants spent the same time looking at the 1 and 2 objects outcome in both the baseline trials (M = 10.01, SD = 5.52; M = 9.85, SD = 4.78, for one object and two objects, respectively, t(15) = 0.16, p > 0.5, d = 0.04, two-tailed, Bonferroni corrected, 95% CI = −3.2, 3.7) and the test trials (M = 11.36, SD = 4.97; M = 11.88, SD = 4.45, for 1 object and 2 objects, respectively, t(15) = −0.4, p > 0.5, d = 0.1, two-tailed, Bonferroni corrected, 95% CI = −3.3, 2.26). No interaction effects were found between Object Outcome, Trial Order and Test Pair. Nonparametric analysis revealed that only 7 out of 16 infants had a larger preference for the one object outcome in the test trials (p = 0.4, via a binomial test), while in the baseline trials 8 out of 16 infants preferred the one object outcome (p = 0.6, via a binomial test). The difference between both conditions was non-significant (p = 1, Fisher's exact test). Additionally, we examined the nature of the reported null result in this experiment further by including a Bayes factor analysis using a one-sample t-test on the baseline-test trial difference score. This resulted in a Bayes Factor that favored the null (Scaled-Information Bayes Factor = 2.82; Rouder et al., 2009).

Finally, a 2 (Object Outcome: 1 or 2 objects) × 2 (Trial Type: baseline or test) × 2 (Experiment Type: Experiment 1 or Experiment 3) analysis of variance (ANOVA) yielded a significant three-way interaction among Outcome, Trial Type and Experiment Type, F(1, 30) = 4.74, p = 0.037, η 2p = 0.14. This interaction suggests that the pattern of results in Experiment 3 is significantly different from that of Experiment 1.

# Discussion

The results of Experiment 3 reveal infants' failure to individuate two agents behind the screen after observing two different but non-social actions. Infants who viewed a puppet emerge from behind a screen to open a box and then an identical-looking puppet emerge to engage in the opposite action of closing the box looked equally long at 1 and 2 object outcomes, suggesting that they did not clearly represent how many agents were involved in the event. In other words, events involving two discrete and opposite actions are not sufficient for driving infants' individuation judgments. This lack of sensitivity is striking since these events involved the same exact actions and movements (opening and closing a box) as those observed in Experiment 1. This suggests that infants' individuation judgments are not merely based upon observing actions that are perceptually distinct from one another.

This pattern also suggests that infants are not inferring the number of individuals in the event by representing the number of first-order goals they have attributed to the agents. For instance, infants in Experiment 1 might have attributed to an agent the goal of "opening" the box in one moment and the agent's goal of "closing" the box in the next and used that as the basis of their individuation judgment. However, despite the first order goals of the agents being equated, infants exhibited significantly different patterns of looking in the current experiment compared to those in Experiment 1. Taken together these results suggest that infants' successful individuation in Experiment 1 was not purely a response based on them counting perceptually discrete events or goal states.

# GENERAL DISCUSSION

The current study utilized an individuation task to investigate whether 11-month-old infants use social dispositions to keep track of the agents' individual identity. Experiment 1 found that when infants observe two different sociomoral actions, such as helping and hindering, their looking pattern is consistent with them having an expectation of two agents, despite the agents looking perceptually identical. By contrast, infants in Experiment 2 who observed two separate but identical sociomoral actions (either helping-helping or hindering-hindering), failed to individuate two agents, indicating that infants do not infer the

number of agents involved in the event solely based on the number of discrete actions they had perceived. Likewise, in Experiment 3 infants fail to individuate two agents based on differences in motion or distinct first-order intentions (e.g., puppets who engage in opposite actions, closing and then opening a box) alone, despite these events being the same as those actions infants witnessed in Experiment 1. However, it is worth highlighting that we did not find a significant effect in the test phase of Experiment 1 across both Helping and Hindering trials. Significant differences in test trials were obtained only in the Hindering first condition. Although an interaction effect in Experiment 1 indicates a significant change in the patter of infants' looking time, stronger evidence of an individuation effect of sociomoral dispositions should be collected in future studies. Ideally, this evidence should be collected by comparing experiments with similar group's baseline preferences. However, together these three experiments support the possibility that by the end of the first year of life infants represent intentions with sociomoral content as diagnostic of individual identity. While other types of social interactions might be sufficiently salient to drive similar individuation judgments, the difference between helpful and harmful actions might be an especially meaningful distinction for establishing social preferences (e.g., see Hamlin, 2013b for a review) and for tracking identity early in life.

The suggestion that infants' sociomoral evaluations govern their judgments about identity in the current work may be useful in explaining prior demonstrations of sociomoral evaluation in infants (Hamlin et al., 2007). In these studies, 9-montholds pick the character who previously displayed a prosocial action. One interpretation of this result in light of the current findings is that infants' choice of who to select or reject is informed by an underlying attribution they make about the agent's sociomoral identity. Infants' choice, even in a third-party context may be supported by the belief that an agent's past behavior is indicative of how it normally behaves or how it might behave in the future. This idea has support from recent work showing that 14-month-old infants seemingly expect an agent who has acted in a helpful manner toward another (e.g., helping them climb a hill) to also distribute resources fairly in another context (Surian et al., 2018). Therefore, it seems that early on in development infants are able to reason about agents' sociomoral behaviors as stable and identity-determining dispositions. However, other authors (Liu et al., 2007) have claimed that the origins of trait-based reasoning may come from an understanding of labels as referring to kinds. Labeling, and namely generic language, has been shown to promote essentialist beliefs in the social domain (Rhodes et al., 2012). Thus, it could be the case that the use of trait labels leads children to infer that sociomoral behaviors come from internal and stable dispositions. The current individuation study suggest, however, that at the onset of language acquisition infants have already a basic intuition connecting sociomoral behaviors to different individuals. Over development, and through labeling, children may get a deeper understanding of sociomoral dispositions and engage in a more sophisticated social reasoning. For instance, although preschoolers understand the stability of sociomoral traits over time (Diesendruck and Lindenbaum, 2009), not until

8–9 years of age children are able to make trait-consistent predictions based only on observed behavioral information (Rholes and Ruble, 1984). Additionally, the early ability to represent sociomoral behaviors as stable dispositions suggested in the current research is only one part of a mature traitbased reasoning. Representing sociomoral disposition as traits also implies making rich inductions about possible behaviors, emotions and attitudes in different scenarios, and thus it implies a wider sense of identity (Heyman and Gelman, 1999).

Although the current research suggest that for infants sociomoral disposition are diagnostic of individual identity it is less informative as to how precisely they represent the identity of sociomoral agents. For example, the representation of the identity of an animal is different from the identity of an artifact (Kelemen and Carey, 2007). Animals, as natural kinds, are represented as possessing an objective and intrinsic identity, whereas artifacts are represented as possessing a more contextual and graded identity (Estes, 2003; Rips, 2011). The current research cannot determine how strongly infants connect an agent's sociomoral behavior to their identity, as both natural and artifact kinds have been shown to support object individuation in infancy (Xu et al., 2004; Futo et al., 2010).

There are at least two possible interpretations of the current results. First, infants may represent an agent's sociomoral disposition as a stable trait that is indicative of its kind or category. In support of this view, a recent study demonstrated that 9-month-old cannot form graded representations of prosocial and antisocial dispositions in the same agent (Steckler et al., 2017). Over time, children may become more flexible and admit graded representations of moral dispositions. A second possibility is that infants represent moral dispositions as a more relative and contextual trait from the start. This interpretation would be necessary for infants to exhibit more complex social inferences, as people engage in different types of social relationships with different people and in diverse situations. Indeed, previous research has demonstrated that infants are able to take into account contextual factors when reasoning about social behavior. For instance, infants prefer to interact with prosocial over antisocial agents, but they also prefer antisocial agents who harm dissimilar others (Hamlin et al., 2013a). Thus, they know that being "mean" or "nice" depends on the previous history of the characters involved. Either way, the current research suggests, first, that infants are able to use abstract psychological information to individuate different moral agents, and second, that they prioritize second-order over first-order intentions in doing so. However, more research is necessary to clarify how infants connect moral disposition to agents' identity.

The issue about agents' identity is also related to the observed asymmetry between Hindering first trials versus Helping first trials in Experiment 1. Infants seemed to have a stronger representation of two individuals when they witnessed the negative event first. This result is instructive since it suggests that the valence of the events witnessed had an effect on the infants' looking time, something that did not manifest in Experiment 3, where social information was removed. However, future research should clarify what the reason of this effect was. For instance, the timing of the Helping-Hindering sequence in each trial was

unusually long compared to previous individuation experiments (45 s) and this might be particularly harmful in the Helping first trials where the less salient (and more expected) event was shown first. This raises the possibility of having a stronger individuation effect in a future study by presenting a shorter Helping-Hindering sequence. If the difference still remains, then this effect may be telling of a deeper asymmetry in the infants' representation of sociomoral actions.

A related open question concerns the specificity of the underlying representations infants are using, both in the current experiments and in prior studies using a social evaluation paradigm. To our knowledge, no prior research has determined how specific or abstract infants' representations of such social interactions are. For example, infants may represent sociomoral dispositions that are very specific and conservatively bound to the context or action type in which they were observed (e.g., "the agent helped open the box"). Alternatively, infants may represent the same action in a deeper, more abstract way that refers to a general type of disposition (e.g., "the agent is a helper"). The latter possibility would be indicative of infants possessing a "kind" representation for sociomoral actions, where they represent a variety of sociomoral dispositions of the same valence as belonging to the same category. We are agnostic as to what type of representation may have driven the effects reported here. However, the object individuation paradigm could provide insights related to this distinction in the future by testing whether infants represent two different sociomoral actions of the same valence (e.g., helping an agent open a box and helping an agent climb a hill) as diagnostic of one or two agents. A failure in individuating two agents in this case compared to success in a task that involves two different events of different valences (e.g., helping an agent open a box and hindering an agent's goal of climbing a hill) might indicate infants' representation of such sociomoral interactions in a more kind-based manner.

Some statistical concerns still remain in this study. Significant differences in baseline looking times were obtained only in the Experiment 1, while the test trials did not reach a significant difference between one and two-objects displays. Although the same group of infants were compared across baseline and test trials, thus controlling for individual differences, it would be worthwhile to replicate the results of Experiment 1 by using different procedures in the future.

Finally, this research might also help inform how the representation of agents differs from the representation of physical objects in the infants' mind. Unlike inert physical objects, agents' behavior is better explained by internal non-obvious properties, in such a way that infants' suppose that animal-like

## REFERENCES

agents are endowed with internal physical properties (Setoh et al., 2013). Similarly, social behavior is better explained by internal dispositions as they have more predictive power than first-order intentions. In a previous study (Taborda-Osorio and Cheries, 2018), infants were shown to individuate agents based on the perception of internal physical properties while in the current one infants individuate based on moral dispositions. Thus, it appears that infants may represent agents as possessing diverse causal powers, and they pick these properties as more identitydetermining than external properties when pitted against each other. Future research might expand on these findings by examining whether sociomoral dispositions are attributed to an agent's internal properties and whether infants might also individuate based on other social behaviors (e.g., dominance) and social membership.

# ETHICS STATEMENT

This study was carried out in accordance with the recommendations of the University of Massachusetts Amherst Human Subjects IRB. The protocol was approved by the University of Massachusetts Amherst Human Subjects IRB. All subjects gave written informed consent in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki.

# AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS

HT-O, AL, and EC conceived and planned the experiments. HT-O and AL carried out the experiments. HT-O and EC contributed to the analysis of the results and to the writing of the manuscript.

# FUNDING

This work was supported by a Fulbright Scholarship Award to HT.

# ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank the participating infants and their families, and Neil Berthier, Louise Antony, and Ronnie Janoff-Bulman for providing comments on previous drafts of this manuscript. We also thank Cleo Bergmann, Sara Klum, and Shannon Slater for their help in data collection.

judgements. Child Dev. Pers. 4, 212–218. doi: 10.1111/j.1750-8606.2010. 00149.x

**Conflict of Interest Statement:** The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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