TY  - JOUR
A1  - Adam, Maurits
A1  - Gumbsch, Christian
A1  - Butz, Martin V.
A1  - Elsner, Birgit
T1  - The impact of action effects on infants’ predictive gaze shifts for a non-human grasping action at 7, 11, and 18 months
JF  - Frontiers in psychology
N2  - During the observation of goal-directed actions, infants usually predict the goal at an earlier age when the agent is familiar (e.g., human hand) compared to unfamiliar (e.g., mechanical claw). These findings implicate a crucial role of the developing agentive self for infants' processing of others' action goals. Recent theoretical accounts suggest that predictive gaze behavior relies on an interplay between infants' agentive experience (top-down processes) and perceptual information about the agent and the action-event (bottom-up information; e.g., agency cues). The present study examined 7-, 11-, and 18-month-old infants' predictive gaze behavior for a grasping action performed by an unfamiliar tool, depending on infants' age-related action knowledge about tool-use and the display of the agency cue of producing a salient action effect. The results are in line with the notion of a systematic interplay between experience-based top-down processes and cue-based bottom-up information: Regardless of the salient action effect, predictive gaze shifts did not occur in the 7-month-olds (least experienced age group), but did occur in the 18-month-olds (most experienced age group). In the 11-month-olds, however, predictive gaze shifts occurred only when a salient action effect was presented. This sheds new light on how the developing agentive self, in interplay with available agency cues, supports infants' action-goal prediction also for observed tool-use actions.
KW  - infancy
KW  - predictive gaze behavior
KW  - eye tracking
KW  - tool-use actions
KW  - agency cues
KW  - developing agentive self
KW  - non-human grasping
Y1  - 2021
U6  - https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.695550
SN  - 1664-1078
VL  - 12
PB  - Frontiers Research Foundation
CY  - Lausanne
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Gumbsch, Christian
A1  - Adam, Maurits
A1  - Elsner, Birgit
A1  - Butz, Martin V.
T1  - Emergent goal-anticipatory gaze in infants via event-predictive learning and inference
JF  - Cognitive science
N2  - From about 7 months of age onward, infants start to reliably fixate the goal of an observed action, such as a grasp, before the action is complete. The available research has identified a variety of factors that influence such goal-anticipatory gaze shifts, including the experience with the shown action events and familiarity with the observed agents. However, the underlying cognitive processes are still heavily debated. We propose that our minds (i) tend to structure sensorimotor dynamics into probabilistic, generative event-predictive, and event boundary predictive models, and, meanwhile, (ii) choose actions with the objective to minimize predicted uncertainty. We implement this proposition by means of event-predictive learning and active inference. The implemented learning mechanism induces an inductive, event-predictive bias, thus developing schematic encodings of experienced events and event boundaries. The implemented active inference principle chooses actions by aiming at minimizing expected future uncertainty. We train our system on multiple object-manipulation events. As a result, the generation of goal-anticipatory gaze shifts emerges while learning about object manipulations: the model starts fixating the inferred goal already at the start of an observed event after having sampled some experience with possible events and when a familiar agent (i.e., a hand) is involved. Meanwhile, the model keeps reactively tracking an unfamiliar agent (i.e., a mechanical claw) that is performing the same movement. We qualitatively compare these modeling results to behavioral data of infants and conclude that event-predictive learning combined with active inference may be critical for eliciting goal-anticipatory gaze behavior in infants.
KW  - Infancy
KW  - Goal-anticipatory gaze
KW  - Computational model
KW  - Event cognition
KW  - Active inference
Y1  - 2021
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13016
SN  - 1551-6709
VL  - 45
IS  - 8
PB  - Wiley-Blackwell
CY  - Malden, Mass.
ER  -