The Motor Theory of Goal Tracking

Lecturer: Stephen A. Butterfill

According to the Motor Theory of Goal Tracking, in humans, some pure goal-tracking processes involve only motor processes and representations. This Theory supports a conjecture about development: In the first nine months of life, all pure goal-tracking is explained by the Motor Theory. Other goal-tracking processes emerge later in development.

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Notes

According to the Motor Theory, infants’ (and adults’) pure goal-tracking sometimes depends on the double life of motor processes (see Sinigaglia & Butterfill, 2015 for details).

More carefully the Motor Theory of Goal Tracking} depends on four claims:

1. in action observation, possible outcomes of observed actions are represented motorically;
2. these representations trigger motor processes much as if the observer were performing actions directed to the outcomes;
3. such processes generates predictions;
4. a triggering representation is weakened if the predictions it generates fail.

The result is that, often enough, the only only outcomes to which the observed action is a means are represented strongly. motor processes occur in action observation partly because the means-ends computations they enable are the core part of a goal-tracking process.

The Developmental Motor Conjecture

This conjecture states that:

in the first nine months of life, all pure goal tracking is explained by the Motor Theory. Other goal-tracking processes emerge later in development.

This conjecture is inspired by Gredebäck & Falck-Ytter (2015), Hunnius & Bekkering (2014) and Woodward & Gerson (2014) among others. (These authors have interestingly different theoretical positions and would be unlikely to endorse the conjecture, for good reasons (see below). However, they all provide considerations which motivate considering this conjecture.)

This Conjecture, if true, would neatly explain why goal tracking in the first months of life is limited. But there’s a problem. It is not quite true to say that infants’ goal tracking is limited by their abilities to represent actions motorically.

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