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CNL Lunch Talks
Amanda Woodward Thursday Sept 28th 2006, 12:30 PM, 3416 Marie Mount Hall Infants' understanding the personal and conventional aspects of action
To adult eyes, human action is structured in three critical ways: (1)
Actions are structured by intentions. Actions are not sheer motions
through space, but rather organized with respect to goals; Action is
object-directed; (2) Intentions reside in individuals. A person's actions
and intentions at time 1 provide critical information for understanding
their actions at time 2. Keeping track of individuals is essential for
interpreting a person's actions on-line; (3) Individuals participate in
conventions. There are regularities in action that transcend the
individual (language and other conventional forms). Representing these
aspects of action structure is foundational for everyday social
activities, from the concrete (e.g. avoiding collisions with passersby on
the street) to the abstract (e.g., linguistic communication). It is also
foundational for early social, cognitive and linguistic development. In
this talk, I will consider the infant origins of these aspects of action
analysis, focusing in particular on infants' extraction of the individual
and conventional aspects of action. I will begin by outlining a visual
habituation technique for tapping infants' representations of others'
intentional actions. I will then describe recent experiments from my
group that use this technique to investigate whether and when infants
attribute intentions to individuals and generalize conventions across
individuals. We find both abilities are present, to some extent, by the
end of the first year of life. I will then consider how these abilities
may emerge in development, presenting preliminary data that explore this
question.
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