How do infants identify the psychological actors in their environments? Three groups of 12-month-old infants were tested for their willingness to encode a simple approach behavior as goal-directed as a function of whether it was performed by (1) a human hand, (2) a morphologically unfamiliar green object that interacted with a confederate and behaved intentionally, or (3) the same unfamiliar green object that behaved in a matched, but apparently random manner. Using a visual habituation technique, only infants in the first two conditions were found to encode the approach behavior as goal-directed Thus infants appear able to attribute goals to non-human, even unfamiliar agents. These results imply that by the end of the first year of life infants have a broad notion of what counts as an agent that cannot easily be reduced to humans, objects that are perceptually similar to humans, or objects that display self-propulsion.

Twelve-month-old infants attribute goals to both familiar, human agents and unfamiliar, non-human agents. They also attribute goal-directedness to both familiar actions and unfamiliar ones. Four conditions examined information 12-month-olds use to determine which actions of an unfamiliar agent are goal-directed. Infants who witnessed the agent interact contingently with a human confederate encoded the agent's actions as goal-directed; infants who saw a human confederate model an intentional stance toward the agent without the agent's participation, did not. Infants who witnessed the agent align itself with one of two potential targets before approaching that target encoded the approach as goal-directed; infants who did not observe the self-alignment did not encode the approach as goal-directed. A possible common underpinning of these two seemingly independent sources of information is discussed.Research over the past decade has shown that infants construe people's behavior as directed at the world. By the end of their first year, infants selectively encode human behaviors such as grasping (Woodward, 1998), pointing (Woodward & Guajardo, 2002, looking (Johnson, Luo, & Ok, in press;Phillips, Wellman, & Spelke, 2002;Woodward, 2003), and emoting Repacholi, 1998) relative to possible targets in the world. Where and how they draw the line between intentional actors like people and non-intentional objects like rocks is debated.Some have proposed that infants attribute intentionality quite broadly, based on mechanisms designed to detect any goal-directed action, regardless of the identity of the actor (e.g., Baron-