Outcome producing potential influences twelve-month-olds’ interpretation of a novel action as goal-directed

• Published in: Infant behavior & development 2014-11, Vol.37 (4), p.729-738
• Main Authors: Biro, Szilvia, Verschoor, Stephan, Coalter, Esther, Leslie, Alan M.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Action interpretation; Biological and medical sciences; Child development; Cognitive development; Developmental psychology; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Goal attribution; Newborn. Infant; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology
• ISSN: 0163-6383; 1879-0453
• DOI: 10.1016/j.infbeh.2014.09.004

•We investigated infants’ ability to interpret observed novel actions in terms of goals.•Linking a novel action to a salient outcome is critical for goal attribution.•Prior experience allows goal attribution in novel situations without salient outcome. Learning about a novel, goal-directed action is a complex process. It requires identifying the outcome of the action and linking the action to its outcome for later use in new situations to predict the action or to anticipate its outcome. We investigated the hypothesis that linking a novel action to a salient change in the environment is critical for infants to assign a goal to the novel action. We report a study in which we show that 12-month-old infants, who were provided with prior experience with a novel action accompanied with a salient visible outcome in one context, can interpret the same action as goal-directed even in the absence of the outcome in another context. Our control condition shows that prior experience with the action, but without the salient effect, does not lead to goal-directed interpretation of the novel action. We also found that, for the case of 9-month-olds infants, prior experience with the outcome producing potential of the novel action does not facilitate a goal-directed interpretation of the action. However, this failure was possibly due to difficulties with generalizing the learnt association to another context rather than with linking the action to its outcome.