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AbstractThree studies investigated infants' understanding that gaze involves a relation between a person and the object of his or her gaze. Infants were habituated to an event in which an actor turned and looked at one of two toys. Then, infants saw test events in which (1) the actor turned to the same side as during habituation to look at a different toy, or (2) the actor turned to the other side to look at the same toy as during habituation. The first of these involved a change in the relation between actor and object. The second involved a new physical motion on the part of the actor but no change in the relation between actor and object. Seven‐ and 9‐month‐old infants did not respond to the change in relation between actor and object, although infants at both ages followed the actor's gaze to the toys. In contrast, 12‐month‐old infants responded to the change in the actor–object relation. Control conditions verified that the paradigm was a sensitive index of the younger infants' representations of action: 7‐ and 9‐month‐olds responded to a change in the actor–object relation when the actor's gaze was accompanied by a grasp. Taken together, these findings indicate that gaze‐following does not initially go hand in hand with understanding the relation between a person who looks and the object of his or her gaze, and that infants begin to understand this relation between 9 and 12 months.

AbstractAs with all culturally relevant human behaviours, words are meaningful because they are shared by the members of a community. This research investigates whether 9‐month‐old infants understand this fundamental fact about language. Experiment 1 examined whether infants who are trained on, and subsequently habituated to, a new word–referent link expect the link to be consistent across a second speaker. Experiment 2 examined whether 9‐month‐old infants distinguish between behaviours that are shared across individuals (i.e. words) from those that are not (i.e. object preferences). The present findings indicate that infants as young as 9 months of age expect new word–referent links, but not object preferences, to be consistent across individuals. Thus, by 9 months, infants have identified at least one of the aspects of human behaviour that is shared across individuals within a community. The implications for children's acquisition of language and culture are discussed.

AbstractPredicting the actions of others is critical to smooth social interactions. Prior work suggests that both understanding and anticipation of goal‐directed actions appears early in development. In this study, on‐line goal prediction was tested explicitly using an adaptation of Woodward's (1998) paradigm for an eye‐tracking task. Twenty 11‐month‐olds were familiarized to movie clips of a hand reaching to grasp one of two objects. Then object locations were swapped, and the hand made an incomplete reach between the objects. Here, infants reliably made their first look from the hand to the familiarized goal object, now in a new location. A separate control condition of 20 infants familiarized to the same movements of an unfamiliar claw revealed the opposite pattern: reliable prediction to the familiarized location, rather than the familiarized object. This study suggests that by 11 months infants actively use goal analysis to generate on‐line predictions of an agent's next action.

AbstractSkilled social interactions require knowledge about others' intentions and the ability to implement this knowledge in real‐time to generate appropriate responses to one's partner. Young infants demonstrate an understanding of other people's intentions (e.g. Woodward, Sommerville, Gerson, Henderson & Buresh, 2009), yet it is not until the second year that infants seem to master the real‐time implementation of their knowledge during social interactions (e.g. Warneken & Tomasello, 2007). The current study investigates the possibility that developments in social competence during the second year are related to increases in the speed with which infants can employ their understanding of others' intentions. Twenty‐ to 22‐month‐old infants (N = 23) viewed videos of goal‐directed actions on a Tobii eye‐tracker and then engaged in an interactive perspective‐taking task. Infants who quickly and accurately anticipated another person's future behavior in the eye‐tracking task were more successful at taking their partner's perspective in the social interaction. Success on the perspective‐taking task was specifically related to the ability to correctly predict another person's intentions. These findings highlight the importance of not only being a 'smart' social partner but also a 'fast' social thinker.

AbstractIn the current study, we tested whether 7‐month‐old infants would selectively imitate the goal‐relevant aspects of an observed action. Infants saw an experimenter perform an action on one of two small toys and then were given the opportunity to act on the toys. Infants viewed actions that were either goal‐directed or goal‐ambiguous, and that represented either completed or uncompleted goals. Infants reproduced the goal of the experimenter only in those cases where the action was goal‐directed, in both the complete and incomplete goal conditions. These results provide the first evidence that infants as young as 7 months of age selectively imitate actions based on their goal‐directedness, and that they are able to analyze the goals of even uncompleted actions. Even during the first year of life, infants' sensitivity to goal‐directed action is expressed not only in their responses in visual habituation procedures, but also in their overt actions.

AbstractThe extent to which toddlers have opportunities to learn in interactive, observational, and independent contexts is thought to vary by culture. However quantitative assessments of cultural variability and of the factors driving intra‐ and inter‐cultural differences in toddler's time allocation are lacking. This paper provides a comparative and quantitative examination of how toddlers spend their time and with whom (adults or children) in two communities (rural Yucatec Maya, urban United States). Additionally, it considers individual factors that predict time allocation. Results demonstrated that Maya toddlers spent more time in independent contexts compared to US toddlers and spent more time exclusively with other children than did US toddlers. Maya toddlers were more likely than US toddlers to spend time observing other people, however, when given the opportunity to observe others there were no differences in visual attentional allocation across cultures. For Maya toddlers maternal schooling related negatively to both time spent with other children and time spent in interactive contexts. The findings highlight the need for researchers to include diverse populations when considering early social experiences as well as assessing factors that may contribute differentially to variations in early experience across cultures.

AbstractThe mechanisms that support infant action processing are thought to be involved in the development of later social cognition. While a growing body of research demonstrates longitudinal links between action processing and explicit theory of mind (TOM), it remains unclear why this link emerges in some measures of action encoding and not others. In this paper, we recruit neural measures as a unique lens into which aspects of human infant action processing (i.e., action encoding and action execution; age 7 months) are related to preschool TOM (age 3 years;n = 31). We test whether individual differences in recruiting the sensorimotor system or attention processes during action encoding predict individual differences in TOM. Results indicate that reduced occipital alpha during action encoding predicts TOM at age 3. This finding converges with behavioral work and suggests that attentional processes involved in action encoding may support TOM. We also test whether neural processing during action execution draws on the proto‐substrates of effortful control (EC). Results indicate that frontal alpha oscillatory activity during action execution predicted EC at age 3—providing strong novel evidence that infant brain activity is longitudinally linked to EC. Further, we demonstrate that EC mediates the link between the frontal alpha response and TOM. This indirect effect is specific in terms of direction, neural response, and behavior. Together, these findings converge with behavioral research and demonstrate that domain general processes show strong links to early infant action processing and TOM.

AbstractEarly exposure to multiple languages can enhance children's communication skills, even when children are effectively monolingual (Fan, Liberman, Keysar & Kinzler, ). Here we report evidence that the social benefits of multilingual exposure emerge in infancy. Sixteen‐month‐old infants participated in a communication task that required taking a speaker's perspective to understand her intended meaning. Infants were presented with two identical toys, such as two cars. One toy was mutually visible to both the infant and the speaker, but the other was visible only to the infant and was blocked from the speaker's view by an opaque barrier. The speaker requested the mutually visible toy and we evaluated whether infants understood the speaker's request. Whereas monolingual infants were at chance in choosing between the two toys, infants with multilingual exposure reliably chose the toy the speaker requested. Successful performance was not related to the degree of exposure to other languages, suggesting that even minimal multilingual exposure may enhance communication skills.

AbstractThe current study investigated the relationship between mother–child interaction quality and infants' ability to interpret actions as goal‐directed at 7 months in a sample of 37 dyads. Interaction quality was assessed in a free play interaction using two distinct methods: one assessed the overall affective quality (emotional availability), and one focused on the mother's proclivity to treat her infant as an intentional agent (mind‐mindedness). Furthermore, infants' ability to interpret human actions as goal‐directed was assessed. Analyses revealed that only maternal emotional availability, and not maternal mind‐mindedness, was related to infants' goal‐encoding ability. This link remained stable even when controlling for child temperament, working memory, and maternal education. These findings provide first evidence that emotionally available caregiving promotes social‐cognitive development in preverbal infants.

AbstractRecent work implicates a link between action control systems and action understanding. In this study, we investigated the role of the motor system in the development of visual anticipation of others' actions. Twelve‐month‐olds engaged in behavioral and observation tasks. Containment activity, infants' spontaneous engagement in producing containment actions; and gaze latency, how quickly they shifted gaze to the goal object of another's containment actions, were measured. Findings revealed a positive relationship: infants who received the behavior task first evidenced a strong correlation between their own actions and their subsequent gaze latency of another's actions. Learning over the course of trials was not evident. These findings demonstrate a direct influence of the motor system on online visual attention to others' actions early in development.

AbstractRecent reports of similar patterns of brain electrical activity (electroencephalogram: EEG) during action execution and observation, recorded from scalp locations over motor‐related regions in infants and adults, have raised the possibility that two foundational abilities – controlling one's own intentional actions and perceiving others' actions – may be integrally related during ontogeny. However, to our knowledge, there are no published reports of the relations between developments in motor skill (i.e. recording actual motor skill performance) and EEG during both action execution and action observation. In the present study we collected EEG from 21 9‐month‐olds who were given opportunities to reach for toys and who also observed an experimenter reach for toys. Event‐related desynchronization (ERD) was computed from the EEG during the reaching events. We assessed infants' reaching‐grasping competence, including reach latency, errors, preshaping of the hand, and bimanual reaches, and found that desynchronization recorded in scalp electrodes over motor‐related regions during action observation was associated with action competence during execution. Infants who were more competent reachers, compared to less competent reachers, exhibited greater ERD while observing reaching‐grasping. These results provide initial evidence for an early emerging neural system integrating one's own actions with the perception of others' actions.