Abstract
Infants and adults frequently observe actions performed jointly by more than one person. Research in action perception, however, has focused largely on actions performed by an individual person. Here, we explore how 9- and 12-month-old infants and adults perceive a block-stacking action performed by either one agent (individual condition) or two agents (joint condition). We used eye tracking to measure the latency of participants’ gaze shifts towards action goals. Adults anticipated goals in both conditions significantly faster than infants, and their gaze latencies did not differ between conditions. By contrast, infants showed faster anticipation of goals in the individual condition than in the joint condition. This difference was more pronounced in 9-month-olds. Further analyses of fixations examined the role of visual attention in action perception. These findings are cautiously interpreted in terms of low-level processing in infants and higher-level processing in adults. More precisely, our results suggest that adults are able to infer the overarching joint goal of two agents, whereas infants are not yet able to do so and might rely primarily on visual cues to infer the respective sub-goals. In conclusion, our findings indicate that the perception of joint action in infants develops differentially from that of individual action.
Highlights
From birth, infants observe the behaviour of the people around them, and they learn to anticipate the goals of others’ actions during their first year of life (e.g., [1])
The occurrence of anticipatory gaze shifts indicates that an observer has built a representation of the observed action goal that allows one to predict the outcome of the action before it is completed, and it is typically modulated by infants’ production skills with the respective action (e.g., [4])
Performed t-tests against zero confirmed that participants of all age groups shifted their gaze to the action goals significantly ahead of the agent’s hand, both, in the individual condition (9-month-olds: t(22) = 5.13, p,.001, d = 1.07; 12month-olds: t(22) = 9.45, p,.001, d = 1.97; adults: t(13) = 28.54, p,.001, d = 7.63) and in the joint condition (9-month-olds: t(22) = 2.28, p = .03, d = 0.48; 12-month-olds: t(22) = 4.73, p, .001, d = 0.99; adults: t(13) = 27.14, p,.001, d = 7.25)
Summary
From birth, infants observe the behaviour of the people around them, and they learn to anticipate the goals of others’ actions during their first year of life (e.g., [1]). Interest in how infants passively perceive others’ interactions emerged, that is, actions performed jointly by more than one person (e.g., [2]). It is as yet an unsolved question whether the perception of joint action is essentially consistent with individual action, or whether they follow different developmental trajectories. The anticipation of actions has been investigated extensively both in adults [5,6,7,8,9] and infants [1,4,10,11,12] In these studies, the perception of individually performed manual actions was assessed such as reaching-to-grasp an object [4,11], moving an object into a container [1], or eating [13]. Frequently observed in everyday life, little research has addressed the question of how infants and adults passively perceive these interactions
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