The proposed research will explore the development of infants' responses to actions carried out by others. The experiments all make use of the visual-habituation method. In preliminary research, the investigator has found that, at 9 and (to perhaps a lesser extent) 5 months of age, infants selectively encode the goal of grasping actions performed by a hand; other actions, such as pointing to an object, or touching an object with the back of the hand, are not selectively encoded, nor are actions performed by inanimate objects (e.g., a rod or crane). Further results showed that 12-month-old infants do selectively encode pointing actions. These results suggest that young infants have a system of knowledge to guide their reasoning about human actions, which undergoes development during the first year. The proposed experiments explore the nature and development of this knowledge. They explore: 1) infants' responses to a wide range of actions and corresponding inanimate functional relations; 2) infants' ability to categorize actions as goal-directed or not; 3) infants' ability to integrate information from simultaneous actions; and, finally, 4) infants' responses to means-end sequences involving two distinct actions on two distinct objects. Taken together, these experiments should contribute to our understanding of what are the roots in infancy of early psychological knowledge.

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development (NICHD)
Type
First Independent Research Support & Transition (FIRST) Awards (R29)
Project #
1R29HD035707-01A1
Application #
2704600
Study Section
Human Development and Aging Subcommittee 3 (HUD)
Project Start
1998-07-01
Project End
2003-05-31
Budget Start
1998-07-01
Budget End
1999-05-31
Support Year
1
Fiscal Year
1998
Total Cost
Indirect Cost
Name
University of Chicago
Department
Psychology
Type
Schools of Arts and Sciences
DUNS #
225410919
City
Chicago
State
IL
Country
United States
Zip Code
60637
Gerson, Sarah A; Woodward, Amanda L (2013) The goal trumps the means: Highlighting goals is more beneficial than highlighting means in means-end training. Infancy 18:289-302
Vaish, Amrisha; Woodward, Amanda (2010) Infants use attention but not emotions to predict others' actions. Infant Behav Dev 33:79-87
Mahajan, Neha; Woodward, Amanda (2009) Seven-Month-Old Infants Selectively Reproduce the Goals of Animate But Not Inanimate Agents. Infancy 14:667-679
Woodward, Amanda L; Sommerville, Jessica A; Gerson, Sarah et al. (2009) The emergence of intention attribution in infancy. Psychol Learn Motiv 51:187-222
Sommerville, Jessica A; Woodward, Amanda L; Needham, Amy (2005) Action experience alters 3-month-old infants' perception of others' actions. Cognition 96:B1-11
Sommerville, Jessica A; Woodward, Amanda L (2005) Pulling out the intentional structure of action: the relation between action processing and action production in infancy. Cognition 95:1-30