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Updated: Jun 6, 2026

Defining the Role Of Language in Infants' Object Categorization with Eye-tracking Paradigms
Published on: February 8, 2019
Infants recognize similar goals across dissimilar actions involving object manipulation
1Wabash College, Department of Psychology, Crawfordsville, IN 47933, United States. olofsone@wabash.edu
Abstract:
We investigated infants' ability to recognize the similarity between observed and implied goals when actions differed in surface-level motion details. In two experiments, 10- to 12-month-olds were habituated to an actor manipulating an object and then shown test actions in which the actor contacted the object with a novel hand configuration that implied a goal either similar or dissimilar to the habituation event. Infants in both experiments looked significantly longer at test actions depicting a novel implied goal, suggesting that infants glossed over some surface-level motion details and compared implied goals.
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