Six-Month-Old Infants Predict Agents' Goal-Directed Actions on Occluded Objects.

Abstract

Infants can infer agents' goals after observing agents' goal-directed actions on objects and can subsequently make predictions about how agents will act on objects in the future. We investigated the representations supporting these predictions. We familiarized 6-month-old infants to an agent who preferentially reached for one of two featurally distinct objects following a cue. At test, the objects were sequentially occluded from the infant in the agent's presence. We asked whether infants could generate action predictions without visual access to the relevant objects by measuring whether infants shifted their gaze to the location of the agent's hidden goal object following the cue. We also examined what infants represented about the hidden objects by removing one of the occluders to reveal either the original hidden object or the unexpected other object and measuring infants' looking time. We found that, even without visual access to the objects, infants made predictive gazes to the location of the agent's occluded goal object, but failed to represent the features of either hidden object. These results suggest that infants make goal-based action predictions when the relevant objects in the scene are occluded, but doing so may come at the expense of maintaining representations of the objects.