Understanding infants’ understanding of intentions: Two problems of interpretation

Heineman-Pieper, Jessica; Woodward, Amanda L.

doi:10.1016/j.concog.2003.08.007

Cited by 9 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…One could argue that infants looked longer in the ‘new goal/old location’ test event simply because their attention was drawn (by the poking hand or tube) to a ‘novel object’. This explanation was termed by Woodward (1998; see also Heineman‐Pieper & Woodward, 2003) the ‘spotlight effect’. Note, however, that although the spotlight effect could possibly have been present in both conditions, it was only in the Poking Hand condition that infants looked significantly longer in the new goal/old location test event than in the old goal/new location test event.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Infants’ perception of goal‐directed actions: development through cue‐based bootstrapping

Bı́ró

Leslie

2006

Developmental Science

207

205

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It is now widely accepted that sensitivity to goal-directed actions emerges during the first year of life. However, controversy still surrounds the question of how this sensitivity emerges and develops. One set of views emphasizes the role of observing behavioral cues, while another emphasizes the role of experience with producing own action. In a series of four experiments we contrast these two views. In Experiment 1, it was shown that infants as young as 6 months old can interpret an unfamiliar human action as goal-directed when the action involves equifinal variations. Experiments 2 and 3 demonstrated that 12- and 9-month-olds are also able to attribute goals to an inanimate action if it displays behavioral cues such as self-propelledness and an action-effect. In Experiment 4, we found that even 6-months-olds can encode the goal object of an inanimate action if all three cues, equifinality, self-propelledness and an action-effect, were present. These findings suggest that the ability to ascribe goal-directedness does not necessarily emerge from hands-on experience with particular actions and that it is independent from the specific appearance of the actor as long as sufficient behavioral cues are available. We propose a cue-based bootstrapping model in which an initial sensitivity to behavioral cues leads to learning about further cues. The further cues in turn inform about different kinds of goal-directed agents and about different types of actions. By uniting an innate base with a learning process, cue-based bootstrapping can help reconcile divergent views on the emergence of infants' ability to understand actions as goal-directed.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Infants’ perception of goal‐directed actions: development through cue‐based bootstrapping

Bı́ró

Leslie

2006

Developmental Science

207

205

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“…One possible reason for this inconsistency is that the interactions in the current studies may have seemed more complex to infants. In addition, infants' responses in Hofer and colleagues' study could have been influenced by a confound in the paradigm, the presence of movement during test trials (see Heineman-Pieper & Woodward, 2003). When this confound is eliminated, cues that a person is present seem less effective (Cannon & Woodward, 2010).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A claw is like my hand: Comparison supports goal analysis in infants

Gerson

Woodward

2012

Cognition

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Understanding the intentional relations in others' actions is critical to human social life. Origins of this knowledge exist in the first year and are a function of both acting as an intentional agent and observing movement cues in actions. We explore a new mechanism we believe plays an important role in infants' understanding of new actions: comparison. We examine how the opportunity to compare a familiar action with a novel, tool use action helps 7- and 10-month-old infants extract and imitate the goal of a tool use action. Infants given the chance to compare their own reach for a toy with an experimenter's reach using a claw later imitated the goal of an experimenter's tool use action. Infants who engaged with the claw, were familiarized with the claw's causal properties, or learned the associations between claw and toys (but did not align their reaches with the claw's) did not imitate. Further, active participation in the familiar action to be compared was more beneficial than observing a familiar and novel action aligned for 10-month-olds. Infants' ability to extract the goal-relation of a novel action through comparison with a familiar action could have a broad impact on the development of action knowledge and social learning more generally.

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“…The aim of Study 3 was to test for an alternative explanation of the looking-pattern found throughout Studies 1 and 2, as well as in the Király et al study (2003): rather than due to their understanding of object-directedness, infants might have looked longer at the object change test event as compared to the path change test event because it was the first time that the new goal object had moved, and this event was extremely attention-grabbing (see also Heinemann-Pieper & Woodward, 2003). In the original work on grasping (Woodward, 1998), the author implemented a control condition that involved a nonhuman claw executing the same movements as the human arm and found that infants did not exhibit the pattern of looking longer at the new object when it was grasped by a claw.…”

Section: Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Role of Effects for Infants' Perception of Action Goals

Jovanovic

Király

Elsner

et al. 2007

PSYCHOLOGIA -An International Journal of Psychological Sciences

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Recent studies have demonstrated that 6-month-olds perceive manual actions as object-directed (Woodward, 1999) -and that 8-, but not 6-month-olds, apply this interpretation even to unfamiliar actions if these produce salient object-directed effects (Kiràly, Jovanovic, Prinz, Aschersleben, & Gergely, 2003). The present study had two objectives. First, we tested the alternative interpretation that action effects result in a general increase of attention by testing infants with an analogous paradigm, including however a non-human agent. Second, we investigated in how far the negative findings for the 6-month-olds reported in the study by Kiràly et al. (2003) might be due to the familiarity of the action or the discriminability of the objects involved. The results indicate that adding effects to both a familiar and an unfamiliar action leads even 6-month-olds to interpret the respective action as object-directed, given that the objects are well discriminable. However, infants do not apply such an interpretation to actions of a non-human agent.

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Understanding infants’ understanding of intentions: Two problems of interpretation

Cited by 9 publications

References 6 publications

Infants’ perception of goal‐directed actions: development through cue‐based bootstrapping

Infants’ perception of goal‐directed actions: development through cue‐based bootstrapping

A claw is like my hand: Comparison supports goal analysis in infants

The Role of Effects for Infants' Perception of Action Goals

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