Infants selectively encode the goal object of an actor's reach

Research with young children has shown that, like adults, they focus select ively on the aspects of an actor's behavior that are relevant to his or her underlying intentions. The current studies used the visual habituation par adigm to ask whether infants would similarly attend to those aspects of an action that are related to the actor's goals. Infants saw an actor reach fo r and grasp one of two toys sitting side by side on a curtained stage. Afte r habituation, the positions of the toys were switched and babies saw test events in which there was a change in either the path of motion taken by th e actor's arm or the object that was grasped by the actor. In the first stu dy, 9-month-old infants looked longer when the actor grasped a new toy than when she moved through a new path. Nine-month-olds who saw an inanimate ob ject of approximately the same dimensions as the actor's arm touch the toy did not show this pattern in test. In the second study, 5-month-old infants showed similar, though weaker, patterns. A third study provided evidence t hat the findings for the events involving a person were not due to perceptu al changes in the objects caused by occlusion by the hand. A fourth study r eplicated the 9 month results for a human grasp at 6 months, and revealed t hat these effects did not emerge when infants saw an inanimate object with digits that moved to grasp the toy. Taken together, these findings indicate that young infants distinguish in their reasoning about human action and o bject motion, and that by 6 months infants encode the actions of other peop le in ways that are consistent with more mature understandings of goal-dire cted action. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.