Action experience alters 3-month-old infants' perception of others' actions

Sommerville, Jessica A.; Woodward, Amanda L.; Needham, Amy

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2004.07.004

Cited by 645 publications

(622 citation statements)

References 43 publications

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“…On the one hand, the behavioral results from Experiment 1 dovetail with recent fMRI (Costantini et al, 2005) and TMS findings that biomechanically possible and impossible actions are coded similarilysimilarly by mirror/common coding mechanisms; on the other, the results of Experiment 2 are consistent with recent behavioral (Casile & Giese, 2006), developmental Sommerville, Woodward, & Needham, 2005), and neuroimaging (Buccino et al, 2004;Calvo-Merino et al, 2005Costantini et al, 2005) studies relating the representation of perceived actions to the observer's own ability to perform the action. Calvo-Merino and colleagues (2006), for example, presented expert ballet dancers with examples of dance moves that either were in their own motor repertoire or were performed only by opposite-gender dancers, finding increased activation in mirror circuits for the samegender moves.…”

Section: Attentional Weighting Effects On Automatic Imitationsupporting

confidence: 81%

Automatic imitation of biomechanically possible and impossible actions: Effects of priming movements versus goals.

Longo¹,

Kosobud²,

Bertenthal³

2008

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Perfor

102

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Recent behavioral, neuroimaging, and neurophysiological research suggest a common representational code mediating the observation and execution of actions; yet, the nature of this representational code is not well understood. We address this question by investigating whether this observation-execution matching system (or mirror system) codes both the constituent movements of an action as well as its goal, and how such sensitivity is influenced by the topdown effects of instructions. Automatic imitation of observed finger actions was tested by manipulating whether the movements were biomechanically possible or impossible, while holding the goal constant. When no mention was made of this difference (Experiment 1), comparable automatic imitation was elicited from possible and impossible actions, suggesting that the actions had been coded at the level of the goal. When attention was drawn to the difference between possible and impossible movements (Experiment 2), only possible movements elicited automatic imitation. This sensitivity was specific to imitation, not affecting spatial S-R compatibility (Experiment 3). These results suggest that the human mirror system isautomatic imitation is modulated by top-down influences, coding actions in terms of both movements and goals depending on the focus of attention.

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Section: Attentional Weighting Effects On Automatic Imitationsupporting

confidence: 81%

Automatic imitation of biomechanically possible and impossible actions: Effects of priming movements versus goals.

Longo¹,

Kosobud²,

Bertenthal³

2008

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Perfor

102

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“…The algorithm focuses on motion-based cues, but additional visual mechanisms [e.g., biomechanical motion (40)] as well as nonvisual sensory motor cues (41,42), supplied in part by the mirroring system (43), may also play a role in the learning process. In particular, a possible contribution can come from observing one's own hands in motion.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

From simple innate biases to complex visual concepts

Ullman

Harari

Dorfman

2012

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Early in development, infants learn to solve visual problems that are highly challenging for current computational methods. We present a model that deals with two fundamental problems in which the gap between computational difficulty and infant learning is particularly striking: learning to recognize hands and learning to recognize gaze direction. The model is shown a stream of natural videos and learns without any supervision to detect human hands by appearance and by context, as well as direction of gaze, in complex natural scenes. The algorithm is guided by an empirically motivated innate mechanism-the detection of "mover" events in dynamic images, which are the events of a moving image region causing a stationary region to move or change after contact. Mover events provide an internal teaching signal, which is shown to be more effective than alternative cues and sufficient for the efficient acquisition of hand and gaze representations. The implications go beyond the specific tasks, by showing how domain-specific "proto concepts" can guide the system to acquire meaningful concepts, which are significant to the observer but statistically inconspicuous in the sensory input.A basic question in cognitive development is how we learn to understand the world on the basis of sensory perception and active exploration. Already in their first months of life, infants rapidly learn to recognize complex objects and events in their visual input (1-3). Probabilistic learning models, as well as connectionist and dynamical models, have been developed in recent years as powerful tools for extracting the unobserved causes of sensory signals (4-6). Some of these models can efficiently discover significant statistical regularities in the observed signals, which may be subtle and of high order, and use them to construct world models and guide behavior (7-10). However, even powerful statistical models have inherent difficulties with natural cognitive concepts, which depend not only on statistical regularities in the sensory input but also on their significance and meaning to the observer. For example, in learning to understand actions and goals, an important part is identifying the agents' hands, their configuration, and their interactions with objects (1-3). This is an example in which significant and meaningful features can be nonsalient and highly variable and therefore difficult to learn. Our testing shows that current computational methods for general object detection (11-13) applied to large training data do not result by themselves in automatically learning about hands. In contrast, detecting hands (14), paying attention to what they are doing (15, 16), and using them to make inferences and predictions (1-3, 17) are natural for humans and appear early in development. How is it possible for infants to acquire such concepts in early development?A large body of developmental studies has suggested that the human cognitive system is equipped through evolution with basic innate structures that facilitate the acquisition of meaningf...

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“…The child's everyday visual experience must include hours upon hours, day after day, of watching hands and their actions. This massive visual experience of hand actions may be part of the explanation of infants' early understanding of the causal implications of hand actions (Baldwin, 1993;Roitblat, 1987;Sommerville, Woodward, & Needham, 2005;Woodward, 1998Woodward, , 2003. This fact may also be relevant to the intimate link between hand gestures and conceptual content in language (Goldin-Meadow, 2003a) and to the spontaneous invention by some children of hand gestures as a means of communicating (Goldin-Meadow, 2003b).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

What's in View for Toddlers? Using a Head Camera to Study Visual Experience

Yoshida

Smith

2008

Infancy

185

179

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This article reports 2 experiments using a new method to study 18-to 24-month-olds' visual experiences as they interact with objects. Experiment 1 presents evidence on the coupling of head and eye movements and thus the validity of the head camera view of the infant's visual field in the geometry of the task context. Experiment 2 demonstrates the use of this method in the naturalistic context of toy play with a parent. The results point to the embodied nature of toddlers' attentional strategies and to importance of hands and hand actions in their visual experience of objects. The head camera thus appears to be a promising method that, despite some limitations, will yield new insights about the ecology and content of young children's experiences.Cognition depends on the kinds of experiences that come from having a body with particular perceptual and motor capabilities. (Thelen, 2000, p. 5) Developmental psychologists have long been interested in the nature of the input, in the everyday experiences that characterize early childhood and the role of those experiences in cognitive development. One method used by many (including is) is to record via a video camera the child's naturalistic interactions with toys and social partners in an effort to understand the structure and regularities inherent in these everyday interactions. There is, however, a potentially fundamental problem with this approach that is illustrated in Figure 1. The camera records a third-person view (Figure 1a), the view of an outside observer. This view is not the child's view, which might be more like that shown in Figure 1b. The thirdperson camera provides a fixed and broad view that is not at the body scale of a young child, and when coded by adults for the information present, is potentially biased by the adult's conceptualization of the structure of the larger scene. The purpose of this article is to present preliminary results on a new method, that although far from perfect, may enable researchers to gain new insights into the contents of visual experience from the young learner's point of view.This goal is consistent with a collection honoring themes in Esther Thelen's work because the input from the child's point of view is intimately tied to the child's body and to movement. The role of the body, action, and self-generated experiences is not a well-studied domain within cognitive development, although there are increasing calls for and evidence showing the value of such an approach (e.g., Reiser, Lockman, & Nelson, 2005;Smith & Gasser, 2005;Thelen, 2000) and ample demonstrations of the importance of self-generated experiences in perceptual learning (e.g., Adolph & Berger, 2006;Bertenthal, Campos, & Kermoian, 1994;Gibson, 1969;Lockman, 1990;Ruff & Rothbart, 1996). The goal of this study is to specifically develop a method to study the first-person view-a view intimately tied to self-action-in a developmental period (18-24 months) and task context (toy play) important to language and category learning. Ideally, we would like a dy...

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Action experience alters 3-month-old infants' perception of others' actions

Cited by 645 publications

References 43 publications

Automatic imitation of biomechanically possible and impossible actions: Effects of priming movements versus goals.

Automatic imitation of biomechanically possible and impossible actions: Effects of priming movements versus goals.

From simple innate biases to complex visual concepts

What's in View for Toddlers? Using a Head Camera to Study Visual Experience

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