Abstract
Previous research has shown that young infants perceive others' actions as structured by goals. One open question is whether the recruitment of this understanding when predicting others' actions imposes a cognitive challenge for young infants. The current study explored infants' ability to utilize their knowledge of others' goals to rapidly predict future behavior in complex social environments and distinguish goal-directed actions from other kinds of movements. Fifteen-month-olds (N = 40) viewed videos of an actor engaged in either a goal-directed (grasping) or an ambiguous (brushing the back of her hand) action on a Tobii eye-tracker. At test, critical elements of the scene were changed and infants' predictive fixations were examined to determine whether they relied on goal information to anticipate the actor's future behavior. Results revealed that infants reliably generated goal-based visual predictions for the grasping action, but not for the back-of-hand behavior. Moreover, response latencies were longer for goal-based predictions than for location-based predictions, suggesting that goal-based predictions are cognitively taxing. Analyses of areas of interest indicated that heightened attention to the overall scene, as opposed to specific patterns of attention, was the critical indicator of successful judgments regarding an actor's future goal-directed behavior. These findings shed light on the processes that support “smart” social behavior in infants, as it may be a challenge for young infants to use information about others' intentions to inform rapid predictions.
Highlights
Children’s early development is shaped in myriad ways by their interactions with others
The current study investigates whether infants rely on the goal structure of social events when engaging in prospective thinking about others’ actions, including a specific examination of whether the goaldirected nature of the action influences their predictions
Given the importance of cumulative gaze information for the data reduction and coding procedures used in the current study, strict criteria for gaze data collection were implemented, leading to an additional 7 infants who were tested and excluded from further analysis due to insufficient data from the Tobii eye-tracker (6) or failure to produce a predictive fixation on either test trial (1)
Summary
Children’s early development is shaped in myriad ways by their interactions with others. Interacting with and learning from others depend on the ability to interpret others’ actions as intentional and the ability to deploy this knowledge rapidly in real time to respond appropriately. Converging evidence from several experimental methods has shown that young infants have significant aspects of the first of these abilities, in that they view others’ actions as structured by intentions (e.g., [1,2,3,4]), yet less is known about infants’ ability to rapidly recruit their knowledge about others’ intentions to predict and respond to actions. Infants show sensitivity to the intentional structure of others’ actions by 6 to 9 months of age in their responses during visual habituation experiments (e.g., [3,4,5,6]) and in their tendency to reproduce the goals of others’ actions [2],
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