The Development of Action Perception

Infant action understanding: the roles of active training and motor development

“…Although beyond the scope of this current study, it is an open question regarding the neurocognitive representations that support infants' analysis of goals. Neuroscientific methods have the advantage over behavioral methods providing information about the processes that underlie perception of actions (Stapel, 2020). Studies investigating the neural correlates during action perception that are associated with motor experience and the correlates associated with action training may shed light on this question.…”

“…It is possible that training gives rise to differential attention processing that highlights the relation between the agent and the goal, which cannot be accounted by overt attention alone. Neuroscientific methods (e.g., EEG, fNIRS, or fMRI) may provide more sensitive measures of attentional processing (Begus and Bonawitz, 2020;Filippi et al, 2020;Stapel, 2020;Ellis et al, 2021) and may inform whether active training generates changes in attentional processes which in turn modulates action understanding.…”

“…An extensive behavioral literature has provided evidence for the link between action experience and action understanding in infants (Woodward, 2009;Hunnius and Bekkering, 2014;Gredebäck, 2018;Stapel, 2020). In this literature, "action experience" has been operationalized in two ways: (1) advances in infants' motor development including grasping, means-end skills, or pointing Gredebäck and Kochukhova, 2010;Kanakogi and Itakura, 2011;Loucks and Sommerville, 2012;Melzer et al, 2012;Ambrosini et al, 2013;, and (2) training interventions that introduce infants to new actions Skerry et al, 2013;Gerson and Woodward, 2014a,b).…”

Kinematic Primitives in Action Similarity Judgments: A Human-Centered Computational Model

“…uman vision is highly sensitive to the biological motion patterns created by the movement of other individuals (e.g., [1,2]). From a developmental point of view, this sensitivity to visual preferences exists in newborns [3] and increases significantly over the course of 3 to 24 months [4,5]. Learning to distinguish between different types of action and action exemplars reflects this sensitivity and visual preferences [6].…”

“…Both modalities are widely used in research with single-modality models within 3 Alessia Vignolo (alessia.vignolo@gmail.com) and 6 Alessandra Sciutti (alessandra.sciutti@iit.it) are affiliated with the CONTACT Unit, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Genoa, Italy, IT 16152. 4 Nicoletta Noceti (nicoletta.noceti@unige.it), 5 Elena Nicora (elena.nicora@unige.it) , and 10 Francesca Odone (francesca.odone@unige.it) are affiliated with MaLGa Center -DIBRIS, Universita` di Genova, Genova, Italy, IT 16146.…”