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Origins of Mind

Limits on Infant Goal Tracking

Lecturer: Stephen A. Butterfill

Infants’ pure goal-tracking appears to be subject to a striking limit: in their first nine months of life, they can only track the goals of an action if they can perform a similar enough action around the time the action occurs. The existence of this limit is a fact that stands in need of explanation.

Slides

Notes

Infants’ pure goal-tracking appears to be subject to a striking limit:

Infants in their first nine months of life can only track the goals of an action if they can perform a similar enough1 action around the time the action occurs.

What evidence supports the claim that this limit exists?

Evidence from Observations of Proactive Gaze: Background

To understand the evidence, it is helpful helpful to step back and first consider something interesting about adults when they perform, and when they observe, actions. In performing actions—stacking blocks, say—you do not look at your hand but at the block it will pick up, or, when holding a block, at the location where it will place a block. In acting, our eyes move just ahead of the action. Flanagan & Johansson (2003) showed that the same pattern occurs when adults observe another agent acting. In observing an action, the eyes move just ahead of the action. Such proactive eye movements have been used to measure goal tracking in adults (Ambrosini, Costantini, & Sinigaglia, 2011, p. e.g.][).

Evidence from Observations of Proactive Gaze

Background

When observing a hand that is approaching some objects and about to grasp one of them, infants will, like adults, often look to the target of the action in advance on the hand arriving there (Falck-Ytter, Gredeback, & Hofsten, 2006). As in the case of adults, we may take this proactive gaze to be evidence of goal tracking. But the occurrence of this proactive gaze in infants is related to their own abilities to represent the observed actions motorically. To a first approximation, we might say that for those infants who are not yet able to reach, their eyes do not arrive on an object to be grasped in advance of the hand grasping it (Kanakogi & Itakura, 2011).

Evidence of Limits

If we consider proactive gaze for different kinds of observed actions (such as various kinds of grasping actions or putting objects into containers), we find that infants’ gaze to the target of an action becomes more proactive as they become able perform the particular kind of action observed (Ambrosini et al., 2013; Cannon, Woodward, Gredebäck, von Hofsten, & Turek, 2012 (who studied 12-month-olds)).

In adults, tying the hands impairs proactive gaze (Ambrosini, Sinigaglia, & Costantini, 2012); in infants, boosting grasping with ‘sticky mittens’ facilitates proactive gaze (Woodward, 2009; see also Sommerville, Woodward, & Needham, 2005; Sommerville, Hildebrand, & Crane, 2008; Ambrosini et al., 2013; Skerry, Carey, & Spelke, 2013).

Further evidence comes from studies which compare reaching bodies with nonbodily events (Kanakogi & Itakura, 2011; Cannon & Woodward, 2012 Adam et al., 2016).

Other sources

It is also possible to find links between action ability and goal tracking using habituation rather than anticipatory looking (Sommerville & Woodward, 2005).

At the time the action occurs

None of the evidence considered so far bears on when infants must represent actions motorically. To establish the above limit, we need studies in which infants’ abilities to act are temporarily impaired or enhanced.

Bruderer, Danielson, Kandhadai, & Werker (2015) temporarily impaired six-month-olds’ abilities to act in one of two ways by getting them to suck either a tongue-constraining dummy or a lip-constraining dummy. They found a corresponding effect on infants’ abilities to track actions.

Glossary

habituation : Habituation is used to test hypotheses about which events are interestingly different to an infant. In a habituation experiment, infants are shown an event repeatedly until it no longer holds their interest, as measured by how long they look at it. The infants are then divided into two (or more) groups and each group is shown a new event. How much longer do they look at the new event than at the most recent presentation of the old event? This difference in looking times indicates dishabituation, or the reawakening of interest. Given the assumption that greater dishabituation indicates that the old and new events are more interestingly different to the infant, evidence from patterns of dishabituation can sometimes support conclusions about patterns in how similar and different events are to infants.
pure goal-tracking : Tracking goals is pure when does not involve ascribing intentions or any other mental states.

References

Adam, M., Reitenbach, I., Papenmeier, F., Gredebäck, G., Elsner, C., & Elsner, B. (2016). Goal saliency boosts infants’ action prediction for human manual actions, but not for mechanical claws. Infant Behavior and Development, 44, 29–37. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infbeh.2016.05.001
Ambrosini, E., Costantini, M., & Sinigaglia, C. (2011). Grasping with the eyes. Journal of Neurophysiology, 106(3), 1437–1442. https://doi.org/10.1152/jn.00118.2011
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
Ambrosini, E., Sinigaglia, C., & Costantini, M. (2012). Tie my hands, tie my eyes. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 38(2), 263–266. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0026570
Bruderer, A. G., Danielson, D. K., Kandhadai, P., & Werker, J. F. (2015). Sensorimotor influences on speech perception in infancy. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(44), 13531–13536. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1508631112
Cannon, E. N., & Woodward, A. L. (2012). Infants generate goal-based action predictions. Developmental Science, 15(2), 292–298. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7687.2011.01127.x
Cannon, E. N., Woodward, A. L., Gredebäck, G., von Hofsten, C., & Turek, C. (2012). Action production influences 12-month-old infants’ attention to others’ actions. Developmental Science, 15(1), 35–42. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7687.2011.01095.x
Costantini, M., Ambrosini, E., Cardellicchio, P., & Sinigaglia, C. (2014a). How your hand drives my eyes. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 9(5), 705–711. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nst037
Costantini, M., Ambrosini, E., Cardellicchio, P., & Sinigaglia, C. (2014b). How your hand drives my eyes. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 9(5), 705–711.
Falck-Ytter, T., Gredeback, G., & Hofsten, C. von. (2006). Infants predict other people’s action goals. Nature Neuroscience, 9(7), 878–879.
Flanagan, J. R., & Johansson, R. S. (2003). Action plans used in action observation. Nature, 424(6950), 769–771.
Kanakogi, Y., & Itakura, S. (2011). Developmental correspondence between action prediction and motor ability in early infancy. Nature Communications, 2, 341. https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms1342
Skerry, A. E., Carey, S. E., & Spelke, E. S. (2013). First-person action experience reveals sensitivity to action efficiency in prereaching infants. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110(46), 18728–18733. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1312322110
Sommerville, J. A., Hildebrand, E. A., & Crane, C. C. (2008). Experience matters: The impact of doing versus watching on infants’ subsequent perception of tool-use events. Developmental Psychology, 44(5), 1249–1256. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0012296
Sommerville, J. A., & Woodward, A. L. (2005). Pulling out the intentional structure of action: The relation between action processing and action production in infancy. Cognition, 95(1), 1–30.
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
Woodward, A. L. (2009). Infants’ Grasp of Others’ Intentions. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 18(1), 53–57. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8721.2009.01605.x

Endnotes

  1. I stipulate that two actions are similar enough in a context if they are either both of the same kind (for example, both reaching actions) or else similar enough that the differences make no difference for the purposes of goal tracking in that context. For example, reaching and pre-reaching are similar enough in many contexts. ↩