The Microstructure of Action Perception in Infancy: Decomposing the Temporal Structure of Social Information Processing

Abstract

In this article, we review recent evidence of infants' early competence in perceiving and interpreting the actions of others. We present a theoretical model that decomposes the timeline of action perception into a series of distinct processes that occur in a particular order. Once an agent is detected, covert attention can be allocated to the future state of the agent (priming), which may lead to overt gaze shifts that predict goals (prediction). Once these goals are achieved, the consequence of the agents' actions and the manner in which the actions were performed can be evaluated (evaluation). We propose that all of these processes have unique requirements, both in terms of timing and cognitive resources. To understand more fully the rich social world of infants, we need to pay more attention to the temporal structure of social perception and ask what information is available to infants and how this changes over time.

How do infants and adults process communicative events in real time?

“…Finally, when the Listener presented the object to the Communicator, participants looked back at the Communicator. Just as infants process nonverbal actions similarly to adults (reviewed in Gredebäck & Daum, 2015; see also Rosander & von Hofsten, 2011), our findings suggest that infants and adults can also process communicative vocal events in very similar ways.…”

“…Within this dynamic environment, adults can quickly identify, predict, and evaluate others’ behaviors in real time, as the actions are unfolding (e.g., Daum & Gredebäck, 2011; Flanagan & Johansson, 2003; Langdon & Smith, 2005). However, little is known about how infants process dynamic communicative scenes and whether they perceive and interpret others’ actions in real time, as they unfold or evaluate events after they’ve occurred (Aslin, 2007; Gredebäck & Daum, 2015). Infants may process a social event in at least two different ways (Gredebäck & Melinder, 2010).…”

The Developmental Origins of Gaze‐Following in Human Infants

“…In that study, newborns were presented with an image of a schematic face moving her eyes to the side and a target popping out congruently or incongruently with the direction of the eyegaze. Because the figure cued a location with the eye-gaze rather than shifting the eyes toward a visible object, this paradigm is better described as gaze cueing (Frischen et al, THE ORIGINS OF GAZE-FOLLOWING 435 2007) or gaze-priming (Gredeb€ ack & Daum, 2015), rather than as GF. The process underpinning gaze cueing involves a covert shift of attention (i.e., without a concurrent eye movement; Frischen et al, 2007) in the direction cued by the eye-gaze (Gredeb€ ack & Daum, 2015) or motion (Farroni, Johnson, Brockbank, & Simion, 2000).…”

Effects of movement distance, duration, velocity, and type on action prediction in 12-month-olds

“…However, everyday social interactions involve to a great extent the processing of events online, that is, while the event is about to unfold. In contrast to the measurement of infants' discrimination of different magnitudes, the online prediction of action goals is a rapid process that is highly constrained by the time and the information that is available (e.g., Gredebäck & Daum, 2015). Hence, the manipulation of the temporal as well as the spatial aspects of observed actions might substantially influence gaze behavior with respect to the action goals.…”