Abstract
The present study investigates the plasticity of 7-month-old infants’ orienting of attention during their perception of grasping actions. Previous research has shown that when infants observe a grasping hand, they shift their attention in line with the grasping direction, which is indicated by a reliable priming effect in this direction. The mechanisms behind this priming effect are largely unknown, and it is unclear how malleable this priming effect is with respect to a brief exposure to novel action-target contingencies. In a spatial-cueing paradigm, we presented a series of training trials prior to a series of test trials. These training sequences significantly modulated infants’ attention. This suggests that action perception, when assessed through shifts of attention, is not solely based on the infants’ grasping experience but quickly adapts to context-specific observed regularities.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
We tried hard to come up with an idea about the reason why infants completed more trials in the congruent than in the incongruent training condition. The fact that in Experiment 2, the number of completed trials was in an exact opposite pattern compared to Experiment 1 (i.e. more trials in the incongruent than in the congruent training condition) makes it difficult to even come up with a consistent speculation.
This assumption is supported by the comparison of the proportional SRT in the test phase of the incongruent training condition in the present study with the results of the 7-month-olds in Experiment 1 of Daum and Gredebäck (2011a), which yielded a significant difference between the proportional SRTs, t(40) = 3.20, p < .01. An additional analysis between studies indicated that the proportional SRTs differed neither between the test phase of the congruent training condition of the present Experiment 1 nor the results of Experiment 1 in Daum and Gredebäck (2011a), t(40) = 1.05, p = .30.
Note that the AOIs around the cue were larger in Experiment 2 than in Experiment 1. The reason for this was that in Experiment 2 the cue was moving and thus covered a larger area within a similar time window.
As in Experiment 1, we conducted a comparison between the proportional SRT of the test phase in the incongruent training condition of the present study and the results of the 7-month-olds in Experiment 1 by Wronski and Daum (2014). This analysis yielded a significant difference between the two experiments, t(38) = 2.70, p < .01. An additional analysis between studies indicated that the proportional SRTs did not differ between the test phase of the congruent training condition of the present Experiment 1 in the present study and the respective condition in Experiment 1 by Wronski and Daum (2014), t(38) = .14, p = 89.
References
Baillargeon R, Spelke ES, Wasserman S (1985) Object permanence in five-month-old infants. Cognition 20:191–208
Bakker M, Daum MM, Handl A, Gredebäck G (2015) Neural correlates of action perception at the onset of functional grasping. Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci 10(6):769–776. doi:10.1093/scan/nsu119
Bakker M, Sommerville JA, Gredebäck G (2016) Enhanced neural processing of goal-directed actions after active training in 4-month-old infants. J Cogn Neurosci 28:472–482. doi:10.1162/jocn_a_00909
Bernstein AS (1969) To what does the orienting response respond? Psychophysiology 6:338–350
Bertenthal BI, Clifton RK (1998) Perception and action. In: Kuhn D, Siegler RS (eds) Handbook of child psychology: Vol. 2. Cognition, perception, and language, 5th edn. Wiley, New York, pp 51–102
Bertenthal BI, Boyer TW, Harding S (2014) When do infants begin to follow a point? Dev Psychol 50:2036–2048. doi:10.1037/a0037152
Biro S, Leslie AM (2007) Infants’ perception of goal-directed actions: development through cue-based bootstrapping. Dev Sci 10:379–398. doi:10.1111/j.1467-7687.2006.00544.x
Boyer TW, Pan JS, Bertenthal BI (2011) Infants’ understanding of actions performed by mechanical devices. Cognition 121:1–11. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2011.05.012
Brandone AC, Wellman HM (2009) You can’t always get what you want: infants understand failed goal-directed actions. Psychol Sci 20:85–91. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02246.x
Brandone AC, Horwitz SR, Aslin RN, Wellman HM (2014) Infants’ goal anticipation during failed and successful reaching actions. Dev Sci 17:23–34. doi:10.1111/desc.12095
Buccino G, Binkofski F, Fink GR et al (2001) Action observation activates premotor and parietal areas in a somatotopic manner: an fMRI study. Eur J Neurosci 13:400–404. doi:10.1111/j.1460-9568.2001.01385.x
Cannon EN, Woodward AL (2012) Infants generate goal-based action predictions. Dev Sci 15:292–298. doi:10.1111/j.1467-7687.2011.01127.x
Cannon EN, Woodward AL, Gredebäck G et al (2012) Action production influences 12-month-old infants’ attention to others’ actions. Dev Sci 15:35–42. doi:10.1111/j.1467-7687.2011.01095.x
Daum MM, Gredebäck G (2011a) The development of grasping comprehension in infancy: covert shifts of attention caused by referential actions. Exp Brain Res 208:297–307
Daum MM, Gredebäck G (2011b) Spatial cueing by referential human gestures, arrows and mechanical devices. Int J Mind Brain Cogn 2:113–126
Daum MM, Prinz W, Aschersleben G (2008) Encoding the goal of an object-directed but uncompleted reaching action in 6- and 9-month-old infants. Dev Sci 11:607–619
Daum MM, Prinz W, Aschersleben G (2011) Perception and production of object-related grasping in 6-month-olds. J Exp Child Psychol 108:810–818
Daum MM, Attig M, Gunawan R et al (2012) Action seen through babies’ eyes: a dissociation between looking time and predictive gaze. Front Cogn 3:370
Daum MM, Ulber J, Gredebäck G (2013) The development of pointing perception in infancy: effects of communicative verbal cues on covert shifts of attention. Dev Psychol 49:1898–1908. doi:10.1037/a0031111
Einöther SJL, Giesbrecht T (2013) Caffeine as an attention enhancer: reviewing existing assumptions. Psychopharmacology 225:251–274. doi:10.1007/s00213-012-2917-4
Elsner C, D’Ausilio A, Gredebäck G et al (2013) The motor cortex is causally related to predictive eye movements during action observation. Neuropsychologia 51:488–492
Estes K, Evans J, Alibali M, Saffran J (2007) Can infants map meaning to newly segmented words? Statistical segmentation and word learning. Psychol Sci 18:254–260
Falck-Ytter T, Gredebäck G, von Hofsten C (2006) Infants predict other people’s action goals. Nat Neurosci 9:878–879
Flanagan JR, Johansson RS (2002) Hand movements. In: Ramachandran VS (ed) Encyclopedia of the human brain. Academic Press, San Deigo, pp 399–414
Friston K, Kilner J, Harrison L (2006) A free energy principle for the brain. J Physiol-Paris 100:70–87. doi:10.1016/j.jphysparis.2006.10.001
Gallese V (2009) Motor abstraction: a neuroscientific account of how action goals and intentions are mapped and understood. Psychol Res 73:486–498. doi:10.1007/s00426-009-0232-4
Gampe A, Keitel A, Daum MM (2015) Intra-individual variability and continuity of action and perception measures in infants. Front Psychol Dev Psychol. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00327
Gergely G, Nadasdy Z, Csibra G, Biro S (1995) Taking the intentional stance at 12 months of age. Cognition 56:165–193
Gredebäck G, Falck-Ytter T (2015) Eye movements during action observation. Perspect Cogn Sci 10(5):591–598. doi:10.1177/1745691615589103
Gredebäck G, Daum MM (2015) The microstructure of action perception in infancy: decomposing the temporal structure of social information processing. Child Dev Perspect 9:79–83. doi:10.1111/cdep.12109
Gredebäck G, Melinder AMD (2010) Infants’ understanding of everyday social interactions: a dual process account. Cognition 114:197–206
Gredebäck G, Örnkloo H, von Hofsten C (2006) The development of reactive saccade latencies. Exp Brain Res 173:159–164
Gredebäck G, Stasiewicz D, Falck-Ytter T et al (2009) Action type and goal type modulate goal-directed gaze shifts in 14-month-old infants. Dev Psychol 45:1190–1194. doi:10.1037/a0015667
Gredebäck G, Johnson SP, von Hofsten C (2010a) Eye tracking in infancy research. Dev Neuropsychol 35:1–19
Gredebäck G, Melinder AMD, Daum MM (2010b) The neural basis and development of pointing comprehension. Soc Neurosci 5:441–450. doi:10.1080/17470910903523327
Henrichs I, Elsner C, Elsner B et al (2013) Goal certainty modulates infants’ goal-directed gaze shifts. Dev Psychol. doi:10.1037/a0032664
Hofer T, Hauf P, Aschersleben G (2005) Infants’ perception of goal-directed actions performed by a mechanical device. Infant Behav Dev 28:466–480
Hood BM, Willen JD, Driver J (1998) Adult’s eyes trigger shifts of visual attention in human infants. Psychol Sci 9:131–134
Hunnius S, Bekkering H (2010) The early development of object knowledge: a study of infants’ visual anticipations during action observation. Dev Psychol 46:446–454. doi:10.1037/a0016543
Hunnius S, Bekkering H (2014) What are you doing? How active and observational experience shape infants’ action understanding. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 369:20130490. doi:10.1098/rstb.2013.0490
Jakobsen KV, Frick JE, Simpson EA (2013) Look here! The development of attentional orienting to symbolic cues. J Cogn Dev 14:229–249. doi:10.1080/15248372.2012.666772
Jeannerod M (2001) Neural simulation of action: a unifying mechanism for motor cognition. NeuroImage 14:S103–S109
Kanakogi Y, Itakura S (2011) Developmental correspondence between action prediction and motor ability in early infancy. Nat Commun 2:341. doi:10.1038/ncomms1342
Krogh-Jespersen S, Liberman Z, Woodward AL (2015) Think fast! The relationship between goal prediction speed and social competence in infants. Dev Sci 18:815–823. doi:10.1111/desc.12249
Luo Y, Baillargeon R (2005) Can a self-propelled box have a goal? Psychological reasoning in 5-month-old infants. Psychol Sci 16:601–608
Mareschal D, Quinn PC, French RM (2002) Asymmetric interference in 3- to 4-month-olds’ sequential category learning. Cogn Sci 26:377–389. doi:10.1016/S0364-0213(02)00062-9
Melzer A, Prinz W, Daum MM (2012) Production and observation of contralateral reaching: a close link by 12 months of age. Infant Behav Dev 35:570–579
Mitrani L, Dimitrov G (1978) Pursuit eye movements of a disappearing moving target. Vis Res 18:537–539
Nyström P (2008) The infant mirror neuron system studied with high density EEG. Soc Neurosci 3:334–347
Posner MI (1980) Orienting of attention. Q J Exp Psychol 32:3–25
Proverbio AM, Riva F, Zani A (2009) Observation of static pictures of dynamic actions enhances the activity of movement-related brain areas. PLoS ONE 4:e5389. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0005389
Rohlfing KJ, Longo MR, Bertenthal BI (2012) Dynamic pointing triggers shifts of visual attention in young infants. Dev Sci 15:426–435. doi:10.1111/j.1467-7687.2012.01139.x
Schlottmann A, Ray E (2010) Goal attribution to schematic animals: do 6-month-olds perceive biological motion as animate? Dev Sci 13:1–10. doi:10.1111/j.1467-7687.2009.00854.x
Senju A, Johnson MH, Csibra G (2006) The development and neural basis of referential gaze perception. Soc Neurosci 1:220–234. doi:10.1080/1747091060098979
Sommerville JA, Woodward AL (2005) Pulling out the intentional structure of action: the relation between action processing and action production in infancy. Cognition 95:1–30
Sommerville JA, Woodward AL, Needham A (2005) Action experience alters 3-month-old infants’ perception of others’ actions. Cognition 96:B1–B11
Sommerville JA, Blumenthal EJ, Venema K, Sage KD (2012) The body in action: the impact of self-produced action on infants’ action perception and understanding. In: Slaughter V, Brownell C (eds) Early development of body representations. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 247–266
Southgate V, Begus K (2013) Motor activation during the prediction of nonexecutable actions in infants. Psychol Sci 24:828–835. doi:10.1177/0956797612459766
Southgate V, Johnson MH, Osborne T, Csibra G (2009) Predictive motor activation during action observation in human infants. Biol Lett 5:769–772
Stahl AE, Feigenson L (2015) Observing the unexpected enhances infants’ learning and exploration. Science 348:91–94. doi:10.1126/science.aaa3799
von Hofsten C (1982) Eye-hand coordination in newborns. Dev Psychol 18:450–461
von Hofsten C (2007) Action in development. Dev Sci 10:54–60
von Hofsten C, Vishton P, Spelke ES et al (1998) Predictive action in infancy: tracking and reaching for moving objects. Cognition 67:255–285
Wallace PS, Whishaw IQ (2003) Independent digit movements and precision grip patterns in 1–5-month-old human infants: hand-babbling, including vacuous then self-directed hand and digit movements, precedes targeted reaching. Neuropsychologia 41:1912–1918. doi:10.1016/S0028-3932(03)00128-3
Woodward AL (1998) Infants selectively encode the goal object of an actor’s reach. Cognition 69:1–34
Woodward AL (2009) Infants’ grasp of others’ intentions. Curr Dir Psychol Sci 18:53–57
Wronski C, Daum MM (2014) Spatial orienting following directional cues in infancy. Dev Psychol 50:2020–2029. doi:10.1037/a0037155
Wu R, Gopnik A, Richardson DC, Kirkham NZ (2011) Infants learn about objects from statistics and people. Dev Psychol 47:1220–1229. doi:10.1037/a0024023
Acknowledgments
We wish to thank Caterina Böttcher and Kerstin Träger for the acquisition of the participants. We owe special thanks to the infants and parents who participated in this study. This research was supported by ERC Starting Grant 312292 and the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation (2012-0120) awarded to Gustaf Gredebäck.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Ethical approval
All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Daum, M.M., Wronski, C., Harms, A. et al. Action perception in infancy: the plasticity of 7-month-olds’ attention to grasping actions. Exp Brain Res 234, 2465–2478 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-016-4651-3
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-016-4651-3