Infants' Understanding of Looking, Pointing, and Reaching as Cues to Goal-Directed Action

Beate Sodian · Claudia Thoermer

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Child and Animal Learning Development Social Robot Interaction and HRI Action Observation and Synchronization

Abstract

Phillips, Wellman, and Spelke (2002) provided experimental evidence indicating that by the age of 12 months infants use information about an adult's gaze-direction and emotional expression to predict action. We investigate the generality of this ability, using Phillips et al.'s paradigm across different referential gestures. If infants have a rich concept of people as intentional agents, they should encode the person-goal relation and predict action from a variety of referential gestures (such as looking and pointing), as well as from (goal-directed) reaching and grasping actions. Results of Studies 1 and 2 (within-subjects design) and Study 3 (between-subjects design) converge in indicating that Phillips et al.'s basic finding generalizes to reach-and-gaze as cue condition. In Study 3b generalization was demonstrated for point-and-gaze as cue condition. Whereas these findings suggest a general understanding of referential intent at 12 months, a control experiment (Study 4) showed that infants' action expectations could be reversed following a psychologically inconsistent habituation phase (actor points at Object A and subsequently picks up Object B) in the point-and-gaze condition, although no such reversal was obtained in the reach-and-gaze condition. These findings indicate that 1-year-old infants have well-established expectations about action goals signaled by an actor's gaze-direction and reaching and grasping movements but that an understanding of pointing as a cue to action intentions may develop later and follow a different route of acquisition.

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References

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