A claw is like my hand: Comparison supports goal analysis in infants

Abstract

Understanding the intentional relations in others' actions is critical to human social life. Origins of this knowledge exist in the first year and are a function of both acting as an intentional agent and observing movement cues in actions. We explore a new mechanism we believe plays an important role in infants' understanding of new actions: comparison. We examine how the opportunity to compare a familiar action with a novel, tool use action helps 7- and 10-month-old infants extract and imitate the goal of a tool use action. Infants given the chance to compare their own reach for a toy with an experimenter's reach using a claw later imitated the goal of an experimenter's tool use action. Infants who engaged with the claw, were familiarized with the claw's causal properties, or learned the associations between claw and toys (but did not align their reaches with the claw's) did not imitate. Further, active participation in the familiar action to be compared was more beneficial than observing a familiar and novel action aligned for 10-month-olds. Infants' ability to extract the goal-relation of a novel action through comparison with a familiar action could have a broad impact on the development of action knowledge and social learning more generally.

Mirroring and the development of action understanding

“…R. Soc. B 369: 20130181 instances, under the right conditions [41]. As we have highlighted in this paper, the cognitive processes involved in both action production and action understanding describe actions in terms their relation to a goal.…”

“…We evaluated this hypothesis by attempting to teach seven-month-old infants about a novel action, the use of a claw-shaped tool to grasp objects [41]. As noted earlier, prior findings had shown that infants at this age do not spontaneously view actions with a claw as goal directed.…”

“…The claw's movements are closely matched, in timing, trajectory and contact with the object, to the movements of a human reach. Although this event entrains infants' attention to the object in the same way that a reaching hand does, infants do not respond selectively to changes in the goal for the claw events, they do not selectively imitate the goal of the claw's action and they do not generate goal-based predictions concerning the claw's next movements [38,40,41]. Interestingly, when older infants see that the claw is manipulated by a person, they do respond selectively to the goal structure of the experimental events [32], suggesting that the limiting factor is not the type of moving entity involved, but rather the extent to which the infant can understand the event as the action of an agent.…”

Psychological Reasoning in Infancy

“…In line with this analysis, 9-month-olds failed at a preference task in which an agent placed the back of her hand against object-A in the familiarization trials, instead of grasping it; because infants could not infer the goal of this baffling back-of-hand action, they looked equally at the new-and old-object events (Woodward, 1999). Several investigations have taken advantage of this negative result to examine what experiences might lead infants to view the back-of-hand action as goal-directed (e.g., Bíró et al 2014;Király et al 2003; for similar investigations with other novel actions, e.g., Gerson & Woodward 2012. In one experiment, for example, an experimenter and 12-month-olds first took turns lifting Velcrocovered blocks using a Velcro band worn on the back of their hands (Bíró et al 2014).…”

The Development of Social Attention in Human Infants

“…Similarly, it has been suggested that infants code actions at this same level of analysis, because goals can be represented more abstractly than movements, and thus infants can generalize their representations more readily to others' goal-directed actions even if the specific movements vary . For instance, infants learn to generalize one instance of a goal-based action (e.g., goal-directed reaching) to a novel situation in which they observe someone reaching with a mechanical claw, as long as their grasping actions co-occur with the claws' grasping and releasing toys (Gerson & Woodward, 2012).…”