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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Dec 14, 2025

Defining the Role Of Language in Infants' Object Categorization with Eye-tracking Paradigms

Defining the Role Of Language in Infants' Object Categorization with Eye-tracking Paradigms

Published on: February 8, 2019

Six-Month-Old Infants Predict Agents' Goal-Directed Actions on Occluded Objects.

Jessica B Applin¹, Melissa M Kibbe²

¹Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences, Boston University.

Infancy : the Official Journal of the International Society on Infant Studies

|July 18, 2020

Summary

Six-month-old infants predict agent actions towards hidden goals. However, infants may sacrifice object feature representation when predicting actions without visual object access.

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Exploring Infant Sensitivity to Visual Language using Eye Tracking and the Preferential Looking Paradigm

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Area of Science:

Cognitive Development
Infant Psychology
Perception and Action

Background:

Infants infer agent goals from observed actions.
They can predict future actions based on these goals.
Understanding the cognitive representations for these predictions is crucial.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate the representational basis of infants' action predictions.
To determine if infants can predict actions towards occluded objects.
To examine what infants represent about hidden objects during prediction.

Main Methods:

Familiarized 6-month-olds with an agent's preferential object reach.
Occluded objects sequentially in the agent's presence.
Measured predictive gaze shifts to occluded goal locations.
Assessed object representation by revealing objects and measuring looking time.

Main Results:

Infants exhibited predictive gaze shifts to the agent's hidden goal location.
Infants did not show evidence of representing the features of the hidden objects.
Action prediction occurred without visual access to the objects.

Conclusions:

Infants form goal-based action predictions even when objects are occluded.
Predicting actions towards occluded goals may impair the representation of object features.
This suggests a potential trade-off between action prediction and object representation in infancy.