Infants predict other people's action goals
Terje Falck-Ytter, Gustaf Gredebäck & Claes von Hofsten
Department of Psychology, Uppsala University, Sweden

Nature Neuroscience 9, 878 - 879 (2006). online: 20060618
 doi: 10.1038/nn1729 | CrossRef |

Baby starts to think before 1 year old

Baby's Care
Credit: Scidea Art 2006 Source: www.ScideaNews.com

Terje Falck-Ytter et al. studied how well adults, 12-month- and 6-month-old babies were able to predict the outcome of a simple human action [1]. We adults know well that we can predict the possible goal of the action, but how about is the infants? With the help from the parents and their babies, the authors systematically analyzed the babies' performances when they observed a video of a hand transferring objects into a box. As expected, adults predicted the outcome while12-month-olds showed no significant difference with the adults' performances by directing their gaze at the box before the hand arrived; whereas 6-month-olds just shifted their gaze to the goal of the action after the hand arrived.

A predicting response during action understanding, the proactive goal-directed eye movements, should be ascribed to learning effects rather than self-propelled competences and mediated by the interaction between action development and so-called mirror neurons, deduced the authors. Although so many things need to do for complicated brain system, the study reveals at least an important stage of the infants, that is, during the second half of their first year, they come to predict others' actions.--PL 

References

Citation

L. PU

Lin PU.  Baby starts to think before 1 year old. Scidea Sketch 1 (1), ss20060700a2 (2007).

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