Infants’ understanding of everyday social interactions: A dual process account

Abstract

a b s t r a c tSix-and 12-month-old infant's eye movements were recorded as they observed feeding actions being performed in a rational or non-rational manner. Twelve-month-olds fixated the goal of these actions before the food arrived (anticipation); the latency of these gaze shifts being dependent (r = .69) on infants life experience being feed. In addition, 6-and 12-month-olds dilated their pupil during observation of non-rational feeding actions. This effect could not be attributed to light differences or differences in familiarity, but was interpreted to reflect sympathetic-like activity and arousal caused by a violation of infant's expectations about rationality. We argue that evaluation of rationality requires less experience than anticipations of action goals, suggesting a dual process account of preverbal infants' everyday action understanding.

Extrapolation and direct matching mediate anticipation in infancy

“…However, several studies show that infants' experience with a particular task is related to their gaze latencies during observation of the same task (Claxton & McCarty, 2003;Gredebäck & Melinder, 2010;Kanakogi & Itakura, 2011;. We argue that the six-month-olds in the present study did not anticipate the goal of the human action because they do not yet have a motor schema of putting objects into containers.…”

“…At the same time, 6-month-old infants look ahead of the action to the mouth of an actor eating a banana . Gredebäck & Melinder (2010) further showed that the latency time for fixating on the goal (i.e. the mouth) during feeding actions is dependent on the experience of being fed.…”

The developing cognitive substrate of sequential action control in 9- to 12-month-olds: Evidence for concurrent activation models

“…This eye-tracking paradigm overcomes problems that arise due to underdeveloped motor abilities in infants (Verschoor et al, in press;Wang et al, 2012) and enabled us to administer a paradigm to infants conceptually identical to the original Elsner and Hommel (2001) paradigm. The paradigm uses eye movements as actions, which is appropriate since infants can accurately control their eye movements from at least 4 months of age (Scerif et al, 2005) and these can be considered voluntary goal-directed actions (Gredebäck & Melinder, 2010;Falck-Ytter, Gredebäck, & von Hofsten, 2006;Perra & Gattis, 2010;Senju & Csibra, 2008;). An additional advantage of our paradigm is the concurrent recording of Task-Evoked Pupillary Responses (TEPRs) which is relatively new in developmental research (Falck-Ytter, 2008;Jackson & Sirois, 2009;Laeng, Sirois & Gredebäck, 2012;Verschoor et al, in press).…”

Measuring Human-Robot Interaction Through Motor Resonance

“…The explanation of gaze proactivity in terms of MNS activation has been challenged by Eshuis et al [66], who suggested that the tendency to anticipate others' goals might not be mediated by a direct matching process (associated to a motor resonance phenomenon), but rather would depend on a general expectation that humans behave in a goal-directed and rational manner (teleological processing). A recent work by Gredebaeck and colleagues indicates that both direct matching and teleological processing are present since early infancy [67]. However, goal anticipation would be mediated only by a direct matching process, while teleological processing would be responsible for the retrospective evaluation of action rationality and would not require (or would require less) action experience.…”