The joint role of trained, untrained, and observed actions at the origins of goal recognition
Abstract
Recent findings across a variety of domains reveal the benefits of self-produced experience on object exploration, object knowledge, attention, and action perception. The influence of active experience may be particularly important in infancy, when motor development is undergoing great changes. Despite the importance of self-produced experience, we know that infants and young children are eventually able to gain knowledge through purely observational experience. In the current work, three-month-old infants were given experience with object-directed actions in one of three forms and their recognition of the goal of grasping actions was then assessed in a habituation paradigm. All infants were given the chance to manually interact with the toys without assistance (a difficult task for most three-month-olds). Two of the three groups were then given additional experience with object-directed actions, either through active training (in which Velcro mittens helped infants act more efficiently) or observational training. Findings support the conclusion that self-produced experience is uniquely informative for action perception and suggest that individual differences in spontaneous motor activity may interact with observational experience to inform action perception early in life.
Citation
Gerson , S & Woodward , A 2014 , ' The joint role of trained, untrained, and observed actions at the origins of goal recognition ' , Infant Behavior and Development , vol. 37 , no. 1 , pp. 94-104 . https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infbeh.2013.12.013
Publication
Infant Behavior and Development
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0163-6383Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. This is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Infant Behavior and Development. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Infant Behavior and Development, 37,1 (2014), doi:10.1016/j.infbeh.2013.12.013
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