@article{ElsnerPfeiferParkeretal.2013,
  author    = {Elsner, Birgit and Pfeifer, Caroline and Parker, Charlene and Hauf, Petra},
  title     = {Infants' perception of actions and situational constraints - an eye-tracking study},
  series = {Journal of experimental child psychology},
  volume    = {116},
  journal   = {Journal of experimental child psychology},
  number    = {2},
  publisher = {Elsevier},
  address   = {San Diego},
  issn      = {0022-0965},
  doi       = {10.1016/j.jecp.2012.11.014},
  pages     = {428 -- 442},
  year      = {2013},
  abstract  = {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.},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{PatzwaldCurleyHaufetal.2018,
  author    = {Patzwald, Christiane and Curley, Charlotte A. and Hauf, Petra and Elsner, Birgit},
  title     = {Differential effects of others' emotional cues on 18-month-olds' preferential reproduction of observed actions},
  series = {Infant behavior \& development : an international and interdisciplinary journal},
  volume    = {51},
  journal   = {Infant behavior \& development : an international and interdisciplinary journal},
  publisher = {Elsevier},
  address   = {New York},
  issn      = {0163-6383},
  doi       = {10.1016/j.infbeh.2018.04.002},
  pages     = {60 -- 70},
  year      = {2018},
  abstract  = {Infants use others' emotional signals to regulate their own object-directed behavior and action reproduction, and they typically produce more actions after having observed positive as compared to negative emotional cues. This study explored infants' understanding of the referential specificity of others' emotional cues when being confronted with two actions that are accompanied by different emotional displays. Selective action reproduction was measured after 18-month-olds (N = 42) had observed two actions directed at the same object, one of which was modeled with a positive emotional expression and the other with a negative emotional expression. Across four trials with different objects, infants' first actions matched the positively-emoted actions more often than the negatively-emoted actions. In comparison with baseline-level, infants' initial performance changed only for the positively-emoted actions, in that it increased during test. Latencies to first object-touch during test did not differ when infants reproduced the positively- or negatively-emoted actions, respectively, indicating that infants related the cues to the respective actions rather than to the object. During demonstration, infants looked relatively longer at the object than at the model's face, with no difference in positive or negative displays. Infants during their second year of life thus capture the action-related referential specificity of others' emotional cues and seem to follow positive signals more readily when actively selecting which of two actions to reproduce preferentially.},
  language  = {en}
}