How do infants understand the goals of others' actions? It has been proposed that actionunderstanding results from a mechanism whereby an observed action is mapped onto the observer's own motor representation of that action. However, direct evidence of the matching process in early infancy is difficult to find. Here we show the developmental correspondence between action prediction and motor ability by comparing gazing and grasping responses to interesting objects in 4-to 10-month-old infants and adults. The onset of infants' ability to predict the goal of others' action was found to be synchronized with the onset of their own ability to perform that action. moreover, there was correspondence relationship between action-prediction ability and motor ability of same action. our findings indicate that the ability to predict others' action goals requires a corresponding motor ability, providing ontogenetic evidence for a direct matching process by a mirror neuron system.

Over the past 20 years, developmental psychologists have shown considerable interest in the onset of a theory of mind, typically marked by children's ability to pass false-belief tasks. In Western cultures, children pass such tasks around the age of 5 years, with variations of the tasks producing small changes in the age at which they are passed. Knowing whether this age of transition is common across diverse cultures is important to understanding what causes this development. Cross-cultural studies have produced mixed findings, possibly because of varying methods used in different cultures. The present study used a single procedure to measure false-belief understanding in five cultures: Canada, India, Peru, Samoa, and Thailand. With a standardized procedure, we found synchrony in the onset of mentalistic reasoning, with children crossing the false-belief milestone at approximately 5 years of age in every culture studied. The meaning of this synchrony for the origins of mental-state understanding is discussed.

In a series of experiments, chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), an orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus), and human infants (Homo sapiens) were investigated as to whether they used experimenter-given cues when responding to object-choice tasks. Five conditions were used in different phases: the experimenter tapping on the correct object, gazing plus pointing, gazing closely, gazing alone, and glancing without head orientation. The 3 subject species were able to use all of the experimenter-given cues, in contrast to previous reports of limited use of such cues by monkeys.

Accumulating evidence suggests North Americans tend to focus on central objects whereas East Asians tend to pay more attention to contextual information in a visual scene. Although it is generally believed that such culturally divergent attention tendencies develop through socialization, existing evidence largely depends on adult samples. Moreover, no past research has investigated the relation between context-sensitivity and other domains of cognitive development. The present study investigated children in the United States and Japan (N = 175, age 4–9 years) to examine the developmental pattern in context-sensitivity and its relation to executive function. The study found that context-sensitivity increased with age across cultures. Nevertheless, Japanese children showed significantly greater context-sensitivity than American children. Also, context-sensitivity fully mediated the cultural difference in a set-shifting executive function task, which might help explain past findings that East-Asian children outperformed their American counterparts on executive function.

Eleven species of nonhuman primate were tested in a gaze-monitoring task to examine whether they would look where the experimenter looked or pointed. Chimpanzees and an orangutan showed higher correct-response rates than other species. A high correlation was found between correct responses on the gaze-monitoring task and the length of time that the subject continuously concentrated on the experiment.

Two studies are reported in which chimpanzees attempted to use social cues to locate hidden food in one of two possible hiding places. In the first study four chimpanzees were exposed to a local enhancement cue (the informant approached and looked to the location where food was hidden and then remained beside it) and a gazeapoint cue (the informant gazed and manually pointed towards the location where the food was hidden). Each cue was given by both a human informant and a chimpanzee informant. In the second study 12 chimpanzees were exposed to a gaze direction cue in combination with a vocal cue (the human informant gazed to the hiding location and produced one of two different vocalizations: a`food-bark' or a human word-form). The results were: (i) all subjects were quite skillful with the local enhancement cue, no matter who produced it; (ii) few subjects were skillful with the gazeapoint cue, no matter who produced it (most of these being individuals who had been raised in infancy by humans); and (iii) most subjects were skillful when the human gazed and vocalized at the hiding place, with little difference between the two types of vocal cue. Findings are discussed in terms of chimpanzees' apparent need for additional cues, over and above gaze direction cues, to indicate the presence of food.

Abstract. Behavior or Appearance? This is fundamental problem in robot development. Namely, not only the behavior but also the appearance of a robot influences human-robot interaction. There is, however, no research approach to tackling this problem. In order to state the problem, we have developed an android robot that has similar appearance as humans and several actuators generating micro behaviors. This paper proposes a new research direction based on the android robot.

This study investigated whether one hundred and thirty-five 3- to 6-year-old children exhibit a yes bias to various yes-no questions and whether their knowledge status affects the production of a yes bias. Three-year-olds exhibited a yes bias to all yes-no questions such as preference-object and knowledge-object questions pertaining to objects, and knowledge-face questions pertaining to facial expressions. Four-year-olds tended to say "yes" only to knowledge-object questions. Five-year-olds did not show any strong response tendency. Six-year-olds exhibited a nay-saying bias to knowledge-face questions. Also, 3-year-olds could indicate the correct option when asked questions with 2 response options. It suggested that 3-year-olds tended to inappropriately say "yes" to yes-no questions, although they knew the answers to the questions. The mechanism of a yes bias was discussed.