TY  - JOUR
A1  - Hilton, Matthew
A1  - Wartenburger, Isabell
A1  - Elsner, Birgit
T1  - Kinematic boundary cues modulate 12-month-old infants’ segmentation of action sequences
BT  - an ERP study
JF  - Neuropsychologia : an international journal in behavioural and cognitive neuroscience
N2  - Human infants can segment action sequences into their constituent actions already during the first year of life. However, work to date has almost exclusively examined the role of infants' conceptual knowledge of actions and their outcomes in driving this segmentation. The present study examined electrophysiological correlates of infants' processing of lower-level perceptual cues that signal a boundary between two actions of an action sequence. Specifically, we tested the effect of kinematic boundary cues (pre-boundary lengthening and pause) on 12-month-old infants' (N = 27) processing of a sequence of three arbitrary actions, performed by an animated figure. Using the Event-Related Potential (ERP) approach, evidence of a positivity following the onset of the boundary cues was found, in line with previous work that has found an ERP positivity (Closure Positive Shift, CPS) related to boundary processing in auditory stimuli and action sequences in adults. Moreover, an ERP negativity (Negative Central, Nc) indicated that infants' encoding of the post-boundary action was modulated by the presence or absence of prior boundary cues. We therefore conclude that 12-month-old infants are sensitive to lower-level perceptual kinematic boundary cues, which can support segmentation of a continuous stream of movement into individual action units.
KW  - Action segmentation
KW  - Kinematic boundary processing
KW  - ERPs
KW  - Boundary cues
Y1  - 2021
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2021.107916
SN  - 0028-3932
SN  - 1873-3514
VL  - 159
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - Oxford
ER  -