Abstract
Research has shown that infants are able to track a moving target efficiently – even if it is transiently occluded from sight. This basic ability allows prediction of when and where events happen in everyday life. Yet, it is unclear whether, and how, infants internally represent the time course of ongoing movements to derive predictions. In this study, 10-month-old crawlers observed the video of a same-aged crawling baby that was transiently occluded and reappeared in either a temporally continuous or non-continuous manner (i.e., delayed by 500 ms vs. forwarded by 500 ms relative to the real-time movement). Eye movement and rhythmic neural brain activity (EEG) were measured simultaneously. Eye movement analyses showed that infants were sensitive to slight temporal shifts in movement continuation after occlusion. Furthermore, brain activity associated with sensorimotor processing differed between observation of continuous and non-continuous movements. Early sensitivity to an action’s timing may hence be explained within the internal real-time simulation account of action observation. Overall, the results support the hypothesis that 10-month-old infants are well prepared for internal representation of the time course of observed movements that are within the infants’ current motor repertoire.
Highlights
Infants possess a remarkable ability to predict future events
We identified the individual peak frequency (IPF) at the individual peak electrode (IPE) in a given electrode cluster and frequency range (Doppelmayr et al, 1998; Werkle-Bergner et al, 2009)
The difference between non-continuous conditions reduced about 50 pixels, possibly indicating adaptation to non-matching stimulus reappearance in repeated/block stimulus presentation
Summary
Infants possess a remarkable ability to predict future events. This has been demonstrated in various domains such as visual expectation (Canfield and Haith, 1991; Adler et al, 2008), social interaction (Adamson and Frick, 2003; Striano et al, 2006), action perception (Hunnius and Bekkering, 2010; Rosander and von Hofsten, 2011), and object tracking (Rosander and von Hofsten, 2004). Linear extrapolation corresponds to working memory operations (e.g., Baddeley and Hitch, 1974; Pelphrey and Reznick, 2002) maintaining an internal representation of the target movement during occlusion that can be matched following the reappearance to generate predictions In line with this assumption, infants need to plan and control their eye movements based on previously collected information in order to match pre- and post-occlusion input (Bennett and Barnes, 2003; Rosander and von Hofsten, 2004; Springer et al, 2013; Kwon et al, 2014; Bache et al, 2015). Transient occlusion allows manipulating the temporal structure of on-going movement so that the post-occlusion trajectory does not reflect a time-matching continuation of the pre-occlusion movement Applying such a paradigm, behavioral studies in adults pointed out that the processing of observed actions is running parallel to the actions’ time course (e.g., Graf et al, 2007). Processing, Hanslmayr et al, 2012; Werkle-Bergner et al, 2014) in non-matching than in time-matching continuations because real-time simulation during occlusion should result in a prediction error relative to the actual reappearance position following occlusion (Kilner et al, 2007; Stapel et al, 2010)
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