TY  - JOUR
A1  - Elsner, Birgit
A1  - Adam, Maurits
T1  - Infants’ goal prediction for simple action events
BT  - the role of experience and agency cues
JF  - Topics in cognitive science / Cognitive Science Society
N2  - 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.
KW  - Action events
KW  - Infant action‐ goal prediction
KW  - Infant gaze
KW  - behavior
KW  - Eye tracking
KW  - Feedforward processes
KW  - Perception of
KW  - agency  cues
Y1  - 2021
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.12494
SN  - 1756-8765
VL  - 13
IS  - 1
SP  - 45
EP  - 62
PB  - Wiley
CY  - Oxford
ER  -