@article{ElsnerAdam2021,
  author    = {Elsner, Birgit and Adam, Maurits},
  title     = {Infants' goal prediction for simple action events},
  series = {Topics in cognitive science / Cognitive Science Society},
  volume    = {13},
  journal   = {Topics in cognitive science / Cognitive Science Society},
  number    = {1},
  publisher = {Wiley},
  address   = {Oxford},
  issn      = {1756-8765},
  doi       = {10.1111/tops.12494},
  pages     = {45 -- 62},
  year      = {2021},
  abstract  = {Looking times and gaze behavior indicate that infants can predict the goal state of an observed simple action event (e.g., object-directed grasping) already in the first year of life. The present paper mainly focuses on infants' predictive gaze-shifts toward the goal of an ongoing action. For this, infants need to generate a forward model of the to-be-obtained goal state and to disengage their gaze from the moving agent at a time when information about the action event is still incomplete. By about 6 months of age, infants show goal-predictive gaze-shifts, but mainly for familiar actions that they can perform themselves (e.g., grasping) and for familiar agents (e.g., a human hand). Therefore, some theoretical models have highlighted close relations between infants' ability for action-goal prediction and their motor development and/or emerging action experience. Recent research indicates that infants can also predict action goals of familiar simple actions performed by non-human agents (e.g., object-directed grasping by a mechanical claw) when these agents display agency cues, such as self-propelled movement, equifinality of goal approach, or production of a salient action effect. This paper provides a review on relevant findings and theoretical models, and proposes that the impacts of action experience and of agency cues can be explained from an action-event perspective. In particular, infants' goal-predictive gaze-shifts are seen as resulting from an interplay between bottom-up processing of perceptual information and top-down influences exerted by event schemata that store information about previously executed or observed actions.},
  language  = {en}
}