Claudia Elsner

Goal Salience Affects Infants’ Goal-Directed Gaze Shifts

Around their first year of life, infants are able to anticipate the goal of others’ ongoing actions. For instance, 12-month-olds anticipate the goal of everyday feeding actions and manual actions such as reaching and grasping. However, little is known whether the salience of the goal influences infants’ online assessment of others’ actions. The aim of the current eye-tracking study was to elucidate infants’ ability to anticipate reaching actions depending on the visual salience of the goal object. In Experiment 1, 12-month-old infants’ goal-directed gaze shifts were recorded as they observed a hand reaching for and grasping either a large (high-salience condition) or a small (low-salience condition) goal object. Infants exhibited predictive gaze shifts significantly earlier when the observed hand reached for the large goal object compared to when it reached for the small goal object. In addition, findings revealed rapid learning over the course of trials in the high-salience condition and no learning in the low-salience condition. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the results could not be simply attributed to the different grip aperture of the hand used when reaching for small and large objects. Together, our data indicate that by the end of their first year of life, infants rely on information about the goal salience to make inferences about the action goal.

Humans anticipate the goal of other people’s point-light actions

This eye tracking study investigated the degree to which biological motion information from manual point-light displays provides sufficient information to elicit anticipatory eye movements. We compared gaze performance of adults observing a biological motion point-light display of a hand reaching for a goal object or a non-biological version of the same event. Participants anticipated the goal of the point-light action in the biological motion condition but not in a non-biological control condition. The present study demonstrates that kinematic information from biological motion can be used to anticipate the goal of other people’s point-light actions and that the presence of biological motion is sufficient for anticipation to occur.

The neuropsychology of infants’ pro-social preferences

Highlights • Neural correlates of 6-month-old infants’ detection of pro-social agents.• ERP component P400 over posterior temporal areas index social valence.• First non-behavioral demonstration of pro-social preferences in young infants.

Infants’ online perception of give-and-take interactions

Highlights • Study on infants’ online perception of give-me gestures during a social interaction.• We tested if properties of social goals influence infants’ online gaze behavior.• Infants encoded a give-me gesture and an inverted hand shape differently.• Gaze shifts were faster when a receiving hand forms a give-me gesture.• Twelve-month-old infants are sensitive to social goals.

The neural basis of non-verbal communication—enhanced processing of perceived give-me gestures in 9-month-old girls

This study investigated the neural basis of non-verbal communication. Event-related potentials were recorded while 29 nine-month-old infants were presented with a give-me gesture (experimental condition) and the same hand shape but rotated 90°, resulting in a non-communicative hand configuration (control condition). We found different responses in amplitude between the two conditions, captured in the P400 ERP component. Moreover, the size of this effect was modulated by participants’ sex, with girls generally demonstrating a larger relative difference between the two conditions than boys.

Categories and Constraints in Causal Perception

When object A moves adjacent to a stationary object, B, and in that instant A stops moving and B starts moving, people irresistibly see this as an event in which A causes B to move. Real-world causal collisions are subject to Newtonian constraints on the relative speed of B following the collision, but here we show that perceptual constraints on the relative speed of B (which align imprecisely with Newtonian principles) define two categories of causal events in perception. Using performance-based tasks, we show that triggering events, in which B moves noticeably faster than A, are treated as being categorically different from launching events, in which B does not move noticeably faster than A, and that these categories are unique to causal events (Experiments 1 and 2). Furthermore, we show that 7- to 9-month-old infants are sensitive to this distinction, which suggests that this boundary may be an early-developing component of causal perception (Experiment 3).