The phrase "attributing intention" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used when discussing the act of assigning a purpose or motive to someone's actions or statements.
Example: "In analyzing the text, the author is careful about attributing intention to the characters, ensuring that their motivations are clear."
Alternatives: "assigning motive" or "ascribing purpose".
The absence of an increased response to direct gaze in the arMFC and other ToM regions is consistent with the hypothesis that individuals with ASC are not attributing intentions to direct gaze faces in the same way as controls (e.g. he is interested in me, he wants to talk to me).
For instance, is it a good thing that we attribute intention in the curious way that we do, and if so, why? (Is the Knobe effect a bug or a feature?) You can conduct more research to try to clarify matters, but you're left having to interpret the findings; they don't interpret themselves.
An otherwise appealing evolutionary theory of religion, for instance, holds that God and the gods are ghostlike entities created by a "hyperactive agent detection device" in the brain — that is, a hair-trigger response to unusual stimuli that evolved to protect us from danger, but wound up making us mistakenly attribute intention and even divinity to things that have none.
We humans attribute intention almost without thinking about it.
However, teleological explanations are habitually used to explain the behavior of systems to which we cannot easily attribute intention and consciousness.
To talk of art as an agent in the way Jones does in his Jeremiad is to congeal myriad individual instances of art-making into a single, monumental object, and then to attribute intentions to this lifeless lump as if it were in a position to decide how to behave.
In social cognitive neuroscience the ability to attribute intentions and desires to others is being referred to as having a Theory of Mind (ToM).
Accordingly, healthy participants were shown cartoon stories depicting scenarios of cooperation, deception or both; the participants' task was to attribute intentions and beliefs to the protagonists.
The present study focuses on two major questions: Firstly, do humans attribute intentions and self-initiated, rational decisions to robotic agents and secondly, do differing grades of human-likeness of interactors mediate such mental state attributions?
