We propose that action prediction provides a cornerstone in a learning process known as internal forward models. According to this suggestion infants’ predictions (looking to the mouth of someone moving a spoon upward) will moments later be validated or proven false (spoon was in fact directed toward a bowl), information that is directly perceived as the distance between the predicted and actual goal. Using an individual difference approach we demonstrate that action prediction correlates with the tendency to react with surprise when social interactions are not acted out as expected (action evaluation). This association is demonstrated across tasks and in a large sample (n = 118) at 6 months of age. These results provide the first indication that infants might rely on internal forward models to structure their social world. Additional analysis, consistent with prior work and assumptions from embodied cognition, demonstrates that the latency of infants’ action predictions correlate with the infant’s own manual proficiency.

The cultural specificity of action prediction was assessed in 8-month-old Chinese and Swedish infants. Infants were presented with an actor eating with a spoon or chopsticks. Predictive goal-directed gaze shifts were examined using eye tracking. The results demonstrate that Chinese infants only predict the goal of eating actions performed with chopsticks, whereas Swedish infants exclusively predict the goal of eating actions performed with a spoon. Infants in neither culture predicted the goal of object manipulation actions (e.g., picking up food) performed with a spoon or chopsticks. The results support the view that multiple processes (both visual/cultural learning and motor-based direct matching processes) facilitate goal prediction during observation of other peoples' actions early in infancy.

The present study examined the role of attentional demand on infants' perseverative behavior in a noncommunicative looking version of an A-not-B task. The research aimed at clarifying age-related improvements in the attention process that presumably underlies the development of cognitive control. In a between-subjects design, forty 10-month-olds and forty 12-month-olds were assigned to either a distractor or a no-distractor condition as a means of testing the role of attentional load. The authors used an eye tracker to record infants' looking behavior while they anticipated the reappearance of the target of interest as well as continuously throughout the task. The data demonstrated that 10-month-olds show more perseverative looking than do 12-month-olds and that increased attentional demand leads to more perseverative looking. Correct anticipation, however, was not affected by age or distraction. The results also failed to show that 12-month-olds are better than 10-month-olds at handling the increased attentional demand introduced in the distractor condition, in that the effect of the distractor was not larger for the younger infants. Our results are in line with the theoretical view of cognitive control as dependent on a limited attentional resource, which can explain perseverative behaviors in different tasks and at different ages.

Why are infants able to anticipate occlusion events and other people's actions but not the movement of self-propelled objects? This study investigated infant and adult anticipatory gaze shifts during observation of self-propelled objects and human goaldirected actions. Six-month-old infants anticipated self-propelled balls but not human actions. This demonstrates that different processes mediate the ability to anticipate human actions (direct matching) versus self-propelled objects (extrapolation).