Labels facilitate infants' comparison of action goals
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Date
2014Keywords
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Abstract
Understanding the actions of others depends on the insight that these actions are structured by intentional relations. In a number of conceptual domains, comparison with familiar instances has been shown to support children's and adults' ability to discern the relational structure of novel instances. Recent evidence suggests that this process supports infants' analysis of others' goal-directed actions (Gerson & Woodward, 2012). The current studies evaluated whether labeling, which has been shown to support relational learning in other domains, also supports infants' sensitivity to the goal structure of others' actions. Ten-month-old infants observed events in which a familiar action, grasping, was aligned (simultaneously presented) with a novel tool-use action, and both actions were accompanied by a matched label. Following this training, infants responded systematically to the goal structure of the tool-use actions in a goal imitation paradigm. In control conditions, when the aligned actions were accompanied by nonword vocalizations, or when labeling occurred without aligned actions, infants did not respond systematically to the tool-use action. These findings indicate that labels supported infants' comparison of the aligned actions, and this comparison facilitated their understanding of the novel action as goal-directed.
Citation
Gerson , S & Woodward , A 2014 , ' Labels facilitate infants' comparison of action goals ' , Journal of Cognition and Development , vol. 15 , no. 2 , pp. 197-212 . https://doi.org/10.1080/15248372.2013.777842
Publication
Journal of Cognition and Development
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
1524-8372Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright 2014 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Journal of Cognition and Development on 30th April 2014, available online: http://wwww.tandfonline.com/10.1080/15248372.2013.777842
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