TY  - JOUR
A1  - Patzwald, Christiane
A1  - Matthes, Daniel
A1  - Elsner, Birgit
T1  - Eighteen-month-olds integrate verbal cues into their action processing
BT  - evidence from ERPs and mu power
JF  - Infant behavior & development : an international and interdisciplinary journal
N2  - Behavioral research has shown that infants use both behavioral cues and verbal cues when processing the goals of others' actions. For instance, 18-month-olds selectively imitate an observed goal-directed action depending on its (in)congruence with a model's previous verbal announcement of a desired action goal. This EEG-study analyzed the electrophysiological underpinnings of these behavioral findings on the two functional levels of conceptual action processing and motor activation. Mid-latency mean negative ERP amplitude and mu-frequency band power were analyzed while 18-month-olds (N = 38) watched videos of an adult who performed one out of two potential actions on a novel object. In a within-subjects design, the action demonstration was preceded by either a congruent or an incongruent verbally announced action goal (e.g., "up" or "down" and upward movement). Overall, ERP negativity did not differ between conditions, but a closer inspection revealed that in two subgroups, about half of the infants showed a broadly distributed increased mid-latency ERP negativity (indicating enhanced conceptual action processing) for either the congruent or the incongruent stimuli, respectively. As expected, mu power at sensorimotor sites was reduced (indicating enhanced motor activation) for congruent relative to incongruent stimuli in the entire sample. Both EEG correlates were related to infants' language skills. Hence, 18-month-olds integrate action-goal-related verbal cues into their processing of others' actions, at the functional levels of both conceptual processing and motor activation. Further, cue integration when inferring others' action goals is related to infants' language proficiency.
KW  - EEG
KW  - infancy
KW  - social cues
KW  - verbs
KW  - action processing
KW  - social learning
KW  - event-related potentials (ERPs)
KW  - Mu power
KW  - motor activation
Y1  - 2020
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infbeh.2019.101414
SN  - 0163-6383
SN  - 1879-0453
VL  - 58
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - New York
ER  -