INFANTS CONCEPT OF ANIMACY

Nine- and 12-month-old infants' concept of animacy was investigated by exposing them to autonomous motion by an animate and by an inanimate object in a series of three experiments. in the first experiment, incr eases in negative affect in comparison to a baseline condition were ta ken to indicate that children considered an event to be anomalous. Res ults showed that 12-month-old infants consider self-propulsion by a sm all robot to be anomalous, but not self-propulsion by a human stranger . Experiment 2 indicated that 9- and 12-month-old infants expressed si milar affective reactions when the robot's motion was contingent on ve rbal commands given by the mother, suggesting that these children are aware that it is not appropriate for an inanimate object's movements t o be contingent on events occuring at a distance. The third experiment was designed to rule out the possibility that the infants' reactions in Experiment 2 were a function of the incongruity of the mother's beh avior rather than due to the violation of the infant's concept of anim acy. In this experiment, 12-month-olds' levels of attentiveness are in creased when the robot obeyed verbal commands but not when a human str anger did so. These results suggest that infants discriminate animate from inanimate objects on the basis of motion cues by the age of 9 mon ths.