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Published on: August 8, 2019
Perception and production of object-related grasping in 6-month-olds
Moritz M Daum1, Wolfgang Prinz, Gisa Aschersleben
1Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Department of Psychology, D-04103 Leipzig, Germany. daum@cbs.mpg.de
Insights
Six-month-old infants with advanced grasping skills could distinguish between expected and unexpected actions. This suggests early connections between action perception and motor control in infant development.
Area of Science:
- Developmental Psychology
- Cognitive Neuroscience
- Infant Motor Skills
Background:
- Understanding the relationship between action perception and production is crucial for developmental studies.
- Early infant abilities in grasping and action understanding are key indicators of cognitive development.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the link between 6-month-old infants' grasping performance and their perception of human grasping actions.
- To determine if infants can differentiate between expected and unexpected outcomes of observed actions.
Main Methods:
- A within-participants design compared action perception and production tasks in 6-month-olds.
- Infants' looking times were measured during an action perception task involving video stimuli of grasping movements.
- Infants' grasping behaviors were coded as either palmar or thumb-opposite in an action production task.
Main Results:
- Infants capable of thumb-opposite grasps looked longer at unexpected action outcomes, indicating differentiation.
- Infants with only palmar grasps showed no difference in looking times between expected and unexpected outcomes.
- A significant correlation was found between advanced grasping ability and perceptual discrimination of action events.
Conclusions:
- Action perception and action control are closely interrelated even in 6-month-old infants.
- The development of sophisticated motor skills, like thumb-opposite grasping, is associated with enhanced perception of actions.
- These findings provide evidence for early-developing links between motor competence and the understanding of observed actions.
Abstract:
In this study, 6-month-olds' perception of an object-related human grasping action was compared with their level of grasping performance using a within-participants design. In the action perception task, infants were presented with the video of an actor's grasping movement toward an occluded target object. Subsequently, an expected and an unexpected final state of this grasping movement were presented simultaneously, and infants' looking times were measured. In the action production task, infants were presented with three graspable objects. Infants' grasping behavior was coded to be either palmar or thumb-opposite grasping. Results indicate that infants who were already able to perform a thumb-opposite grasp differentiated between the two final states in the action perception task by looking longer toward the unexpected final state. In contrast, infants who showed only palmar grasps looked equally long toward both final states. This finding supports the assumption that action perception and action control are already closely related in infants as young as 6 months.
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