Active Experience Shapes 10‐Month‐Old Infants’ Understanding of Collaborative Goals

Abstract

Collaborative activities in which individuals coordinate their actions to attain a common goal play a fundamental role in our everyday lives. Evidence suggests that infants engage in collaborative activities before their first birthday, however little is known about infants’ understanding of collaborative action. Using a visual habituation paradigm, this research consists of two experiments designed to investigate whether 10-month-olds understand that the actions of collaborative partners are critical to the attainment of a common goal. The results of Experiment 1 suggest that 10-month-olds represent the actions of collaborating partners in terms of a common collaborative goal only after receiving active experience with a collaborative activity. Experiment 2 demonstrated that infants who received active experience with a collaborative activity viewed active engagement in a collaboration as being critical for an individual's actions to be interpreted as being directed towards a collaborative goal. Together, these findings demonstrate that 10-month-olds exhibit an understanding of the shared nature of collaborative goals after a highly salient experience with the activity. Identifying the effects of experience on infants’ understanding of collaborative goals in a laboratory context provides insights into the role that experiences in their everyday lives might play in their understanding of collaboration.

Infants' perceptions of cooperation between a human and robot

“…The results of the study contribute to the literature surrounding the development of an understanding of cooperation early in life. The finding that infants can structure the box-toy event used in the present research as F I G U R E 2 Infants' average looking times (±SE) towards the test trials for each condition cooperative has been replicated in more than one lab and tested alongside several control conditions (see Henderson et al, 2013;Henderson & Woodward, 2011). We extend this work by demonstrating that infants do not structure the box-toy event the same way when a robot is introduced as a partner.…”

“…Research demonstrates that an engagement in and understanding of these requirements of cooperation emerges early in life (e.g., Brownell, ; Brownell & Carriger, ; Eckerman & Didow, ; Hay, ; Henderson & Woodward, ; Henderson, Wang, Matz, & Woodward, ; Ross & Lollis, ; Warneken, Chen, & Tomasello, ; Warneken & Tomasello, see Melis & Warneken, for review). In fact, by the age of 14 months, infants can structure the actions of two human agents as being towards a shared goal (Henderson et al, ; Henderson & Woodward, ). To illustrate, Henderson and Woodward () habituated 14‐month‐old infants to an event in which one actor (i.e., box opener) opened a box and another (i.e., toy getter) reached inside to retrieve a toy.…”

Experience facilitates the emergence of sharing behavior among 7.5-month-old infants.

“…Although our findings cannot directly answer this question, we speculate that active participation is more important. First, prior work suggests that active experience plays an important role and may have a distinct effect over observational experience in infants’ understanding of others’ actions (Henderson, Wang, Matz, & Woodward, 2013; Gerson & Woodward, 2014; Gerson, Bekkering, & Hunnius, 2015; Sommerville, Hildebrand, & Crane, 2008). By extension, we think active experience was more important in facilitating sharing.…”

Perception of Individual and Joint Action in Infants and Adults

“…One interpretation to explain this finding is that infants could not benefit from a representation of the overarching joint goal in the same way as adults. Such an interpretation is supported by studies showing that infants in their first year of life are usually not yet able to infer [29] or anticipate joint action [2]. Without such a representation, gaze could not be guided towards sub-goals in a top-down manner.…”