The impact of action effects on infants’ predictive gaze shifts for a non-human grasping action at 7-, 11-, and 18 months

• DOI: 10.31234/osf.io/pc42j
• Publication Date: 2021-01-26T18:23:46Z
• Authors: Maurits Adam; Christian Gumbsch; Martin V. Butz; Birgit Elsner
• Keywords: Predictive coding; Sense of Agency

During the observation of goal-directed actions, infants usually predict goal when action and agent are familiar, but they do not as easily or unfamiliar. Recent theoretical accounts suggest that predictive gaze behavior relies on a complex interplay between bottom-up- (e.g., agency cues) top- down information prior experience with action), depending an observer’ knowledge about unfolding event. Based these accounts, we hypothesized during grasping actions performed by mechanical claw, younger would need cues to show behavior, whereas older be able regardless cues. Therefore, presented 7-, 11-, 18-month-old videos claw repeatedly approached grasped object then either did produce salient effect. The 7-month-olds were effect, 11-month-olds only effect was presented, 18-month-olds These results therefore support idea bottom-up top-down crucial factor for production agents.