Abstract
It is well established that, from an early age, human infants interpret the movements of others as actions directed towards goals. However, the cognitive and neural mechanisms which underlie this ability are hotly debated. The current study was designed to identify brain regions involved in the representation of others' goals early in development. Studies with adults have demonstrated that the anterior intraparietal sulcus (aIPS) exhibits repetition suppression for repeated goals and a release from suppression for new goals, implicating this specific region in goal representation in adults. In the current study, we used a modified paired repetition suppression design with 9-month-old infants to identify which cortical regions are suppressed when the infant observes a repeated goal versus a new goal. We find a strikingly similar response pattern and location of activity as had been reported in adults; the only brain region displaying significant repetition suppression for repeated goals and a release from suppression for new goals was the left anterior parietal region. Not only does our data suggest that the left anterior parietal region is specialized for representing the goals of others' actions from early in life, this demonstration presents an opportunity to use this method and design to elucidate the debate over the mechanisms and cues which contribute to early action understanding.
Highlights
IntroductionHuman infants interpret others' movements in terms of the goal towards which the movement is directed
From an early age, human infants interpret others' movements in terms of the goal towards which the movement is directed
Several channels exhibited significant repetition suppression (RS) for the identity of the object goal approached by the red cone, but only two of these channels were contiguously located and met the p b 0.0292 channel threshold
Summary
Human infants interpret others' movements in terms of the goal towards which the movement is directed. Understanding the mechanisms that support action interpretation, and the development of the underlying brain systems, is important in the study of basic mechanisms of social interaction. Previous studies of goal understanding in infants commonly measure the infant's looking responses. In one such paradigm, infants are repeatedly shown an agent acting upon one of two objects. Infants from as early as three months of age respond with longer looking towards the event in which the agent acts on the previously un-chosen object (Luo, 2011; Sommerville et al, 2005), suggesting that they had encoded the prior events as movements directed towards a specific object
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