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

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