Infants track action goals within and across agents.

Full Abstract

The ability to understand that goals and other intentional relations are attributes of individual people is of fundamental importance to social life. It enables us to predict and interpret actions on-line by relating a person's prior and current behaviors, and distinguishing them from the behaviors of other persons. In this paper, we consider the origins of the ability to mark goals as attributes of individual people. Using a visual habituation paradigm to assess infants' tracking of goals, we tested whether infants represented goals are specific to particular agents. Thirteen-month-old infants restricted reaching goals to particular agents, but generalized a conventional linguistic action, labeling, across agents. Nine-month-old showed the former pattern but not the latter. We discuss these findings in the context of developing understandings of person specific and person general action knowledge.

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Author information

Author/s: Buresh, Jennifer Sootsman (JS); Woodward, Amanda L (AL);

Affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637, USA. jsoots(-atsign-)uchicago.edu

Grants: HD35707 (Agency:NICHD NIH HHS)

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article; Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural

Journal: Cognition (Cognition), published in Netherlands. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2007-Aug; vol 104 (issue 2) : pp 287-314

Dates: Created 2007/05/29; Completed 2007/10/01; Revised 2007/12/03;

PMID: 16930577, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 12/26/2008)

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

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MeSH headings (categories)

This article was linked to the MESH Headings shown below.

Humans
Infant
Intention

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