When Do Humans First Track Goals?

Lecturer: Stephen A. Butterfill

When do human infants first track goal-directed actions and not just movements? A variety of evidence suggests that the answer is, from around three months and certainly by 9 months of age.

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Notes

In this lecture, my overall aim is to convince you that there is a puzzle about the ontogenetic development of goal tracking in humans. But I’m starting with (what appears to be) a very simple question …

When do human infants first track goal-directed actions rather than mere movements only?

I take for granted that goals are not intentions. The former are outcomes to which an action could be directed, whereas the latter are mental states. Since I focus on pure goal-tracking, I also assume that:

‘intention attribution and action understanding are two separable processes’ (Uithol & Paulus, 2014, p. 617).

On the basis of a habituation experiemnt, Woodward, Sommerville, & Guajardo (2001, p. \ 153) claim that

‘Six-month-olds and 9-month-olds showed a stronger novelty response (i.e., looked longer) on new-goal trials than on new-path trials (Woodward 1998). That is, like toddlers, young infants selectively attended to and remembered the features of the event that were relevant to the actor’s goal.’

But is this justified? Suppose we distinguish targets from goals. Then we can ask whether infants are merely tracking targets (and not otherwise tracking goals). And since Woodward (1998) does not vary the goal other than by varying the target, findings from that experiment cannot answer this question.

Other experiments do involve manipulating not just the targets of actions but (also) the types of action (Behne, Carpenter, Call, & Tomasello, 2005; Ambrosini et al., 2013). I therefore tenatively conculde that infants can track goals from nine months of age (or earlier).

The next question is, How do they do this?

Glossary

goal : A goal of an action is an outcome to which it is directed.

pure goal-tracking : Tracking goals is pure when does not involve ascribing intentions or any other mental states.

target : The target or targets of an action (if any) are the things the towards which it is directed.

track a goal : For a process to track a goal of an action is for how that process unfolds to nonaccidentally depend in some way on whether that outcome is indeed a goal of the action. For someone to track the goals of an action is for there to be processes in her which track one or more goals of that action.

References

Ambrosini, E., Reddy, V., Looper, A. de, Costantini, M., Lopez, B., & Sinigaglia, C. (2013). Looking Ahead: Anticipatory Gaze and Motor Ability in Infancy. PLOS ONE, 8(7), e67916. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0067916

Behne, T., Carpenter, M., Call, J., & Tomasello, M. (2005). Unwilling versus unable: Infants’ understanding of intentional action. Developmental Psychology, 41(2), 328–337.

Luo, Y. (2011). Three-month-old infants attribute goals to a non-human agent. Developmental Science, 14(2), 453–460. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7687.2010.00995.x

Sommerville, J. A., Woodward, A. L., & Needham, A. (2005). Action experience alters 3-month-old infants’ perception of others’ actions. Cognition, 96(1), B1–B11. https://doi.org/16/j.cognition.2004.07.004

Uithol, S., & Paulus, M. (2014). What do infants understand of others’ action? A theoretical account of early social cognition. Psychological Research, 78(5), 609–622. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-013-0519-3

Woodward, A. L. (1998). Infants selectively encode the goal object of an actor’s reach. Cognition, 69, 1–34.

Woodward, A. L., Sommerville, J. A., & Guajardo, J. J. (2001). Making sense of human behavior: Action parsing and intentional inference. In B. F. Malle, L. Moses, & D. Baldwin (Eds.), Intentions and intentionality (pp. 149–169). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.