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Infants in the second year of life not only detect the visible goals or end-states of other people's action, but they also seem to be able to infer others’ underlying intentions. The present study used event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate the biological basis of infants’ processing of others’ goal-directed actions, with special regard to the involvement of bottom-up perceptual and top-down conceptual processes. In an adaptation of the behavioral re-enactment procedure, 14-month-olds were first familiarized with either full demonstrations (FD), failed attempts (FA), or arbitrary (AA) object-directed actions. Next, ERPs were measured while all infants saw the same two pictures of the end-states of the full demonstration (complete end-state) and the failed attempt (incomplete end-state). In the time-windows related to perceptual processing (100–200 ms after stimulus onset) and to conceptual processing (300–700 ms), ERP negativity over frontal and central regions was higher for the complete than for the incomplete end-state in the FD and FA conditions. When comparing the FA and AA conditions, this pattern of results occurred only for the conceptual time domain. Moreover, beginning slow-wave activity (700–1000 ms) differed for the end-state pictures in the three conditions, suggesting differential encoding demands. Together, the electrophysiological data indicate that infants in the second year of life use bottom-up perceptual as well as top-down conceptual processing to give meaning to others' goal-directed actions.
Do as I say - or as I do?!
(2019)
Infants use behavioral and verbal cues to infer another person’s action intention. However, it is still unclear how infants integrate these often co-occurring cues depending on the cues’ coherence (i.e., the degree to which the cues provide coherent information about another’s intention). This study investigated how 18- and 24-month-olds’ (N = 88 per age group) action selection was influenced by varying the coherence of a model’s verbal and behavioral cues. Using a between-subjects design, infants received six trials with different stimulus objects. In the conditions Congruent, Incongruent, and Failed-attempt, the model uttered a telic verb particle that was followed by a matching or contradicting goal-directed action demonstration, or by a non goal-directed slipping motion, respectively. In the condition Pseudo-word, a nonsense word was combined with a goal-directed action demonstration. Infants’ action selection indicated an adherence to the verbal cue in Congruent, Incongruent, and Failed-attempt, and this was stronger in 24- than 18-month-olds. Additionally, in Incongruent and Failed-attempt, patterns of cue integration across the six trials varied in the two age groups. Regarding the behavioral cue, infants in Congruent and Pseudo-word preferentially followed this cue in both age groups, which also suggested a rather unspecific effect of the verbal cue in Congruent. Relatively longer first action-latencies in Incongruent and Failed-attempt implied that these types of coherence elicited higher cognitive demands than in Congruent and Pseudo-word. Results are discussed in light of infants’ flexibility in using social cues, depending on the cue’s coherence and on age-related social-cognitive differences.