The ability to make sense of the actions of other people is critical to human functioning, and the origins of this ability have inspired much speculation and debate. Until recently, there has been little empirical evidence available to inform our understandings this ability in infants. My collaborators and I have begun to address this gap by asking whether infants make sense of human behavior in ways that are continuous with later concepts of intentional action.
Adults have a strong propensity to construe behavior as goal-directed.
Mature reasoners represent action sequences in terms of the actor's probable goals, weighting goal-related information more heavily in memory than aspects of the events that were not relevant to the actor's goals. With this in mind, we began by assessing infants' encoding of a simple goal-directed action. Babies saw a person reach through a distinctive path in order to grasp one of two toys. This event was repeated until infants had habituated to it. Then, the positions of the toys were reversed, and infant saw test events in which either the path of motion or the goal object of the actor's reach had changed.