Abstract
Action perception links have been argued to support the emergence of action understanding, but their role in infants’ perception of distal goals has not been fully investigated. The current experiments address this issue. During the development of means-end actions, infants shift their focus from the means of the action to the distal goal. In Experiment One, we evaluated whether this same shift in attention (from the means to the distal goal) when learning to produce multi-step actions is reflected in infants’ perception of others’ means-end actions. Eight-months-old infants underwent active training in means-end action production and their subsequent analysis of an observed means-end action was assessed in a visual habituation paradigm. Infants’ degree of success in the training paradigm was related to their subsequent interpretation of the observed action as directed at the means versus the distal goal. In Experiment Two, observational and control manipulations provided evidence that these effects depended on the infants’ active engagement in the means-end actions. These results suggest that the processes that give rise to means-end structure in infants’ motor behavior also support the emergence of means-end structure in their analysis of others’ goals.
Highlights
Human infants are highly attentive and responsive to their social partners
A repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) on the proportion of planful actions in the pre-training, training, and posttraining trials revealed a significant increase in planful actions across these phases, F(2,45) = 18.13, p < 0.001, η2p = 0.45
Infants who benefited from means-end training, in that they became able to organize their own actions in service of a distal goal, subsequently responded to the higher-order goal structure of another person’s means-end actions
Summary
Human infants are highly attentive and responsive to their social partners. They are cognitively engaged with them. Research over the last decade has revealed that infants encode others’ behavior not just as physical motions through space but rather as actions structured by goals (see Meltzoff, 2007; Woodward et al, 2009 for reviews). This sensitivity to the goal structure of action is a cornerstone of social cognition, providing the foundation for social learning (Tomasello, 1999; Baldwin and Moses, 2001) and theory of mind (Wellman et al, 2004, 2008) in early childhood. In the studies reported here, we investigate this process, asking whether and how infants’ own actions may inform their sensitivity to distal goals in others’ actions
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