Infants' Goal Prediction for Simple ActionEvents: The Role of Experience and Agency Cues.

Abstract

Looking times and gaze behavior indicate that infants can predict the goalstate of anobserved simple actionevent (e.g., object-directed grasping) already in the first year of life. The present paper mainly focuses on infants' predictive gaze-shifts toward the goal of an ongoing action. For this, infants need to generate a forward model of the to-be-obtained goalstate and to disengage their gaze from the moving agent at a time when information about the actionevent is still incomplete. By about 6months of age, infants show goal-predictive gaze-shifts, but mainly for familiar actions that they can perform themselves (e.g., grasping) and for familiar agents (e.g., a human hand). Therefore, some theoretical models have highlighted close relations between infants' ability for action-goal prediction and theirmotor development and/or emerging action experience. Recent research indicates that infants can also predict actiongoals of familiar simple actions performed by non-human agents (e.g., object-directed grasping by a mechanical claw) when these agents display agencycues, such as self-propelled movement, equifinality of goalapproach, or production of a salient actioneffect. This paper provides a review on relevant findings and theoretical models, and proposes that the impacts of action experience and of agencycues can be explained from an action-event perspective. In particular, infants' goal-predictive gaze-shifts are seen as resulting from an interplay between bottom-up processing of perceptual information and top-down influences exerted by event schemata that store information about previously executed or observed actions.