Culture Influences Action Understanding in Infancy: Prediction of Actions Performed With Chopsticks and Spoons in Chinese and Swedish Infants

Abstract

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.

What Does Your Gaze Reveal About You? On the Privacy Implications of Eye Tracking

“…Apart from detecting a user's mental presence and measuring the mere intensity of cognitive processing, eye tracking can also provide insights into specific conscious and unconscious thought processes in a large variety of contexts. Among other mental tasks and activities, ocular measures have been used to study memory retrieval [19,31], problem solving [31,75], learning processes [44,69], the formation of expectations [19,27], internal reasoning [19], and mental computations [19,31].…”

“…Additionally, eye movements can reveal a person's knowledge of certain cultural practices. For instance, in an eye tracking study by Green et al [27], Chinese infants exclusively predicted the goal of eating actions performed by an actor with chopsticks, whereas European infants only anticipated that food would be brought to the mouth when eating actions were performed with Western cutlery, as indicated by their predictive gaze shifts towards the actor's mouth.…”

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“…Thus, infants' direct experience with goal-directed events seems to support infants' goal predictions becoming faster and less constrained in terms of event type across development. Infants' knowledge of the goals of events may first start in the everyday events in which they are participants, such as bringing food to the mouth while eating (Green, Li, Lockman, & Gredebäck, 2016;Reid et al, 2009) and navigating obstacles while crawling (Brand, Escobar, Baranès, & Albu, 2015). Predicting the outcomes of these repeated, familiar events may then expand to include the less familiar goals of others.…”

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“…The Action Prediction task (based on Green, Li, Lockman, & Gredebäck, ) consisted of six trials assessing the infants' ability to predict that a spoon will go to an actor's mouth during an eating action. We calculated an action prediction score based on the average saccadic reaction time over trials at which infants made a fixation to the mouth relative to when the spoon left the bowl.…”