Understanding Of Goal-directed Actions Research Articles

The relationship between temperament style and understanding of human goal-directed action in infants

The purpose of this research was to investigate the relationship between temperament style and understanding of goal-directed action in 10–11-month-old infants. Infant social understanding was assessed using a looking-time measure similar to Woodward (1998). This method yielded two measures of infant social understanding; ‘decrement of attention’ (a measure of infant attention during habituation) and ‘novelty preference’ (an index of infants’ understanding of goal-directed behavior). Temperament style was provided by online parent report (IBQ; Rothbart, 1981). Infant shy/fearful temperament predicted decrement of attention scores. Novelty preference was also marginally related to shy temperament, but more strongly associated with low intensity pleasure, specifically enjoyment of physical contact with caregivers. Moreover, shy temperament continued to predict infant social understanding even when controlling for the effect of non-social intelligence (ASQ; Squires, et al., 2009). In our study, as in research with preschool-aged children (Wellman et al., 2011; Mink et al., 2014), shy, reticent temperament style is associated with social information processing, providing further evidence for continuity in individual differences in social cognition in early childhood.

Reaching the goal: Active experience facilitates 8-month-old infants’ prospective analysis of goal-based actions

From early in development, infants view others’ actions as structured by intentions, and this action knowledge may be supported by shared action production/perception systems. Because the motor system is inherently prospective, infants’ understanding of goal-directed actions should support predictions of others’ future actions, yet little is known about the nature and developmental origins of this ability, specifically whether young infants use the goal-directed nature of an action to rapidly predict future social behaviors and whether their action experience influences this ability. Across three conditions, we varied the level of action experience infants engaged in to determine whether motor priming influenced infants’ ability to generate rapid social predictions. Results revealed that young infants accurately generated goal-based visual predictions when they had previously been reaching for objects; however, infants who passively observed a demonstration were less successful. Further analyses showed that engaging the cognitively based prediction system to generate goal-based predictions following motor engagement resulted in slower latencies to predict, suggesting that these smart predictions take more time to deploy. Thus, 8-month-old infants may have motor representations of goal-directed actions, yet this is not sufficient for them to predict others’ actions; rather, their own action experience supports the ability to rapidly implement knowledge to predict future behavior.

Six-month-old infants expect agents to minimize the cost of their actions

Substantial evidence indicates that infants expect agents to move directly to their goals when no obstacles block their paths, but the representations that articulate this expectation and its robustness have not been characterized. Across three experiments (total N=60), 6-month-old infants responded to a novel, curvilinear action trajectory on the basis of its efficiency, in accord with the expectation that an agent will move to its goal on the least costly path that the environment affords. Infants expected minimally costly action when presented with a novel constraint, and extended this expectation to agents who had previously acted inefficiently. Infants’ understanding of goal-directed action cannot be explained alone by sensitivity to specific features of agent’s actions (e.g. agents tend to move on straight paths, along supporting surfaces, when facing their goals directly) or extrapolations of agents’ past actions to their future ones (e.g. if an agent took the shortest path to an object in the past, it will continue to do so in the future). Instead, infants’ reasoning about efficiency accords with the overhypothesis that agents minimize the cost of their actions.

The role of visual processing in motor learning and control: Insights from electroencephalography

Traditionally our understanding of goal-directed action been derived from either behavioral findings or neuroanatomically derived imaging (i.e., fMRI). While both of these approaches have proven valuable, they lack the ability to determine a direct locus of function while concurrently having the necessary temporal precision needed to understand millisecond scale neural interactions respectively. In this review we summarize some seminal behavioral findings across three broad areas (target perturbation, feed-forward control, and feedback processing) and for each discuss the application of electroencephalography (EEG) to the understanding of the temporal nature of visual cue utilization during movement planning, control, and learning using four existing scalp potentials. Specifically, we examine the appropriateness of using the N100 potential as an indicator of corrective behaviors in response to target perturbation, the N200 as an index of movement planning, the P300 potential as a metric of feed-forward processes, and the feedback-related negativity as an index of motor learning. Although these existing components have potential for insight into cognitive contributions and the timing of the neural processes that contribute to motor control further research is needed to expand the control-related potentials and to develop methods to permit their accurate characterization across a wide range of behavioral tasks.

Six-and-a-half-month-old children positively attribute goals to human action and to humanoid-robot motion

Recent infant studies indicate that goal attribution (understanding of goal-directed action) is present very early in infancy. We examined whether 6.5-month-olds attribute goals to agents and whether infants change the interpretation of goal-directed action according to the kind of agent. We conducted three experiments using the visual habituation paradigm. In Experiment 1, we investigated whether 6.5-month-olds attribute goals to human action. In Experiment 2, we investigated whether 6.5-month-olds attribute goals to humanoid-robot motion. In Experiment 3, we tested whether infants attribute goals to a moving box. The agent used in Experiment 3 had no human-like appearance. The results of the three experiments show that infants positively attribute goals to both human action (Experiment 1) and humanoid motion (Experiment 2) but not to a moving box (Experiment 3). These results suggest that 6.5-month-olds tend to interpret certain actions in terms of goals, their reasoning about these actions is based on a sophisticated teleological representation, and that human-like appearance of agents may influence this teleological reasoning in early infancy.