  Once again, the studies of newborn chicks are particularly illuminating. Regolin and colleagues (2000) habituated newborn chicks to a video display involving 2 balls, one red and one blue. At first the balls are presented as static. The red ball then moves, bumps into the blue ball, and then the blue ball moves. After habituation the chicks were presented with a fuzzy oval-shaped red ball and a fuzzy oval-shaped blue ball. The chicks imprinted to the red ball, not the blue one. It seems that they are sensitive to agency—that they see the red ball as an agent, while the blue ball may be a passive object. To make sure it was the red ball’s autonomous movement that was critical, experimenters partly occluded the red ball as it began its movement so that it wasn’t clear whether the movement was autonomous or set in motion by someone or something else. In this condition, the imprinting preference for the red ball disappeared. These chicks were newly hatched, so an explanation for these data that appeals to learning from sensory experience is unavailable. Once again, the chick studies provide an existence proof of an innately specified detection mechanism closely related to agency. Note that the question of what precisely the chick is detecting or representing is still open—is it autonomous motion or agency or some other property.