Abstract
When infants observe a human grasping action, experience-based accounts predict that all infants familiar with grasping actions should be able to predict the goal regardless of additional agency cues such as an action effect. Cue-based accounts, however, suggest that infants use agency cues to identify and predict action goals when the action or the agent is not familiar. From these accounts, we hypothesized that younger infants would need additional agency cues such as a salient action effect to predict the goal of a human grasping action, whereas older infants should be able to predict the goal regardless of agency cues. In three experiments, we presented 6-, 7-, and 11-month-olds with videos of a manual grasping action presented either with or without an additional salient action effect (Exp. 1 and 2), or we presented 7-month-olds with videos of a mechanical claw performing a grasping action presented with a salient action effect (Exp. 3). The 6-month-olds showed tracking gaze behavior, and the 11-month-olds showed predictive gaze behavior, regardless of the action effect. However, the 7-month-olds showed predictive gaze behavior in the action-effect condition, but tracking gaze behavior in the no-action-effect condition and in the action-effect condition with a mechanical claw. The results therefore support the idea that salient action effects are especially important for infants’ goal predictions from 7 months on, and that this facilitating influence of action effects is selective for the observation of human hands.
Highlights
When observing their own or others’ goal-directed actions, humans tend to look at the goal object before the manipulating agent arrives there, predicting the action outcome or the final position of the action [1, 2]
Because the 6-month-olds in Experiment 1 did not show predictive gaze behavior, we presented 7-month-olds in Experiment 2 with the same videos as in Experiment 1 to test whether infants with more knowledge about human grasping would be able to draw on the agency cue of a salient action effect to generate goal-predictive gaze behavior
The regression analyses revealed that infants’ gaze behavior did not change systematically across trials, which is contrary to our hypothesis for the 6-month-olds who generally exhibited tracking gaze behavior in both conditions, and confirms our hypothesis for the 11-month-olds who generally exhibited predictive gaze behavior in both conditions
Summary
When observing their own or others’ goal-directed actions, humans tend to look at the goal object before the manipulating agent arrives there, predicting the action outcome or the final position of the action [1, 2]. This action-goal prediction is suggested to be important for successful interaction with the environment because it helps us to keep up with the speed of actions and action goals while they unfold [3]. The main goal of the present study was to examine critical factors that influence infants’ goal-predictive gaze behavior in the first year of life
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