Action anticipation in human infants reveals assumptions about anteroposterior body-structure and action

Abstract

Animal actions are almost universally constrained by the bilateral bodyplan. For example, the direction of travel tends to be constrained by the orientation of the animal's anteroposterior axis. Hence, an animal's behaviour can reliably guide the identification of its front and back, and its orientation can reliably guide action prediction. We examine the hypothesis that the evolutionarily ancient relation between anteroposterior body-structure and behaviour guides our cognitive processing of agents and their actions. In a series of studies, we demonstrate that, after limited exposure, human infants as young as six months of age spontaneously encode a novel agent as having a certain axial direction with respect to its actions and rely on it when anticipating the agent's further behaviour. We found that such encoding is restricted to objects exhibiting cues of agency and does not depend on generalization from features of familiar animals. Our research offers a new tool for investigating the perception of animate agency and supports the proposal that the underlying cognitive mechanisms have been shaped by basic biological adaptations in humans.

Spontaneous Learning of Visual Structures in Domestic Chicks

“…This way, in the ABC triplet, the leading end was represented equally often by its rightmost or its leftmost element (A and C). Since young organisms seem to be predisposed to map moving agents identifying their leading and trailing ends in relation to their motion direction (i.e., to represent stimuli in terms of “head” and “tail”) [ 84 ], the motion pattern we employed might have impaired the differentiation of the left-right extremities of the stimuli. Another explanation for the lack of preference observed between AC and CA could be that chicks might have interpreted them as representing the same object when viewed from two different viewpoints.…”

Seeing social events: The visual specialization for dyadic human–human interactions.

“…Machines are familiar objects that enable acting-upon. Importantly, their morphology defines an anteroposterior organization (i.e., the leading-end morphologically more complex than the trailing-end), which allows representing facing/nonfacing positioning and can further promote action representation (Hernik, Fearon, & Csibra, 2014). Thus, Experiment 3 was conceived to test the effect of the object class used as context for another body (body vs. non-body object), while matching the asymmetry around the vertical axis to allow a direction (facing vs. nonfacing).…”

10-Month-Old Infants Are Sensitive to the Time Course of Perceived Actions: Evidence From a Study Combining Eye-tracking and EEG

“…We can think of at least three possible reasons why infants in the present study were able to detect temporal changes. First, manipulation in the timing of an object’s motion, as carried out in previous infant studies (Wilcox and Schweinle, 2003;Bremner et al, 2005), might be processed differently than manipulation in the timing of a human action because body form and dynamics offer rich information on, for instance, changes in velocity or direction (Hernik et al, 2014;Wronski and Daum, 2014). This notion corresponds to studies in adults showing that occluded human actions are internally simulated in real-time (Graf et al, 2007;Parkinson et al, 2012;Springer et al, 2013).…”