Reaching for an object or that object: Context and limitations in encoding object features may constrain infant goal attribution

Abstract

That very young infants attribute goals to the object-directed reaches of others is well characterized, but we understand little of what infants encode about the objects being acted on. The present study examined whether the context surrounding the reach, specifically the presence of another object, prompts infants to encode feature information of the target object. To test this, 9-month-old infants in Experiment 1 observed an actor repeatedly reach for one of two objects, while in Experiment 2, infants observed repeated reaches towards one, singly presented object. In both experiments, following habituation, infants observed the actor reach for either the same object as in the past, or a previously unseen, novel object. In Experiment 1, but not Experiment 2, infants looked longer at reaches to the novel object, indicating that this action was unexpected. Considered along with research on visual attention and infant object perception, these results suggest that the initial presence of an alternative object influenced infants’ expectations for future reaches, perhaps by prompting infants to create a feature-bound representation of the target. Thus, the context surrounding a goal-directed action may flexibly influence infants’ action processing to minimize cognitive load.

Infants recruit logic to learn about the social world

“…It is noteworthy that, in Experiment 2, after familiarization with a reaching event involving a single object, infants looked longer in test at actions directed toward this object compared to a new object. Such a pattern, however, was not reported in other studies using similar familiarization, where children were found to look equally at the two events 26,33,37,39 . Thus, this pattern is likely to reflect specific features of our procedure.…”

“…For example, when infants are presented with multiple repetitions of a scene where a hand grasped one of two potential goal-objects, they expect that the agent will choose the same object again in new situations 35 . These results suggest that observing choices can serve as the basis for the attribution of a positive disposition toward the chosen object in early infancy 36,37 .…”

“…To exclude the possibility that infants' looking pattern in Experiment 1 simply reflected the higher saliency of the revealed object, in Experiment 2, we test whether infants look longer at the actions directed toward the revealed object even if they have no previous knowledge about the agent's preference for the other object. Several studies targeting goal attribution in infancy converged in showing that actions toward an object in isolation are often insufficient for encoding the identity of the goal-object 37 and for the attribution of a positive disposition toward it 33,36,39,40 . For example, when habituated with a hand grasping object A in isolation, infants typically do not look longer to a subsequent choice of B over A than to a choice of A over B.…”

“…Infants were familiarized to a choice between a pair of objects (e.g., choosing a toy car over a toy telephone) and then tested with choices between the chosen object and a new one (e.g., a toy car and a ball). While most of the studies targeting infants' goal attribution have focused on choices between the same set of alternatives, recent studies have shown that infants can generalize object-directed dispositions to contexts where the goal-object is contrasted with a new competitor [36][37][38] . That is, when infants are presented with multiple choices of an object A over an object B, they expect that the agent will choose object A over a new object C. Building on these results, we developed a test for the integration of logical conclusions with the representation of actions, where a potential attribution of an avoidance goal could not help the infants.…”