Infants' expectations about gestures and actions in third-party interactions.

Gudmundur B Thorgrimsson,Christine Fawcett,Ulf Liszkowski

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00321

Gudmundur B Thorgrimsson, Christine Fawcett + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00321

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Abstract

We investigated 14-month-old infants’ expectations toward a third party addressee of communicative gestures and an instrumental action. Infants’ eye movements were tracked as they observed a person (the Gesturer) point, direct a palm-up request gesture, or reach toward an object, and another person (the Addressee) respond by grasping it. Infants’ looking patterns indicate that when the Gesturer pointed or used the palm-up request, infants anticipated that the Addressee would give the object to the Gesturer, suggesting that they ascribed a motive of request to the gestures. In contrast, when the Gesturer reached for the object, and in a control condition where no action took place, the infants did not anticipate the Addressee’s response. The results demonstrate that infants’ recognition of communicative gestures extends to others’ interactions, and that infants can anticipate how third-party addressees will respond to others’ gestures.

Highlights

IntroductionThey interpret both instrumental actions, such as reaching, and communicative actions, such as pointing, as goal-directed behavior (Woodward and Guajardo, 2002)
Infants are highly attuned to others’ actions
The infants do not seem to be learning to anticipate the outcomes over the course of the trials, but rather have an a priori expectation regarding the request gesture that leads them to anticipate the give outcome

Summary

Introduction

They interpret both instrumental actions, such as reaching, and communicative actions, such as pointing, as goal-directed behavior (Woodward and Guajardo, 2002) They expect others to consistently reach for the same object (Woodward, 1998; Cannon et al, 2012) and to reach in an efficient manner given the environment (Brandone and Wellman, 2009). The focus of the majority of research on communication and action understanding in infancy is on dyadic settings – where the infant observes or engages with another person in a one-on-one exchange – these represent only a part of infants’ early communicative experience. In traditional cultures where preverbal infants are rarely directly addressed by caregivers (e.g., the Tzeltal Mayans: Brown, 1998; See Lieven, 1994), such observational experiences could play a important role in infants’ social and communicative development

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