TY  - JOUR
A1  - Elsner, Birgit
A1  - Pfeifer, Caroline
A1  - Parker, Charlene
A1  - Hauf, Petra
T1  - Infants' perception of actions and situational constraints - an eye-tracking study
T2  - Journal of experimental child psychology
N2  - Rational action understanding requires that infants evaluate the efficiency of a movement in achieving a goal with respect to situational constraints. In contrast, recent accounts have highlighted the impact of perceptual characteristics of the demonstrated movement or constraints to explain infants' behavior in so-called rational imitation tasks. The current study employed eye tracking to investigate how 13- to 15-month-old infants distribute their visual attention to different aspects of an action demonstration. In three tasks (touchlight, house, and obstacle), infants watched videos in which a model performed an unusual action while she was or was not restricted by situational constraints. Infants' overall looking to the demonstration as well as looking to four segments of the video (initial segment, constraint demonstration, action performance, and final segment) and to specific areas (constraint area of interest [AOI] and action AOI) was analyzed. Overall, infants looked longer at the demonstration in the constraint condition compared with the no-constraint condition. The condition differences occurred in the two video segments where the constraint or action was displayed and were especially profound for the constraint AOI. These findings indicate that infants processed the situational constraints. However, the pattern of condition differences varied slightly in the three tasks. In sum, the data imply that infants process perceptual characteristics of the movement or constraints and that low-level perceptual processes interact with higher level cognitive processes in infants' action perception.
KW  - Eye tracking
KW  - Infant action processing
KW  - 13-to 15-month-old infants
KW  - Visual attention
KW  - Rational action understanding
KW  - Motor resonance account
Y1  - 2013
UR  - https://publishup.uni-potsdam.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/34686
SN  - 0022-0965
SN  - 1096-0457
VL  - 116
IS  - 2
SP  - 428
EP  - 442
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - San Diego
ER  -