Visual context modulates action perception in 10-month-old infants

Research on early action perception has documented infants’ astounding abilities in tracking, predicting, and understanding other people’s actions. Common interpretations of previous findings tend to generalize across a wide range of action stimuli and contexts. In this study, ten-month-old infants repeatedly watched a video of a same-aged crawling baby that was transiently occluded. The video was presented in alternation with videos displaying visually either dissimilar movements (i.e., distorted human, continuous object, and distorted object movements) or similar movements (i.e., delayed or forwarded versions of the crawling video). Eye-tracking behavior and rhythmic neural activity, reflecting attention (posterior alpha), memory (frontal theta), and sensorimotor simulation (central alpha), were concurrently assessed. Results indicate that, when the very same movement was presented in a dissimilar context, it was tracked at more rear parts of the target and posterior alpha activity was elevated, suggesting higher demands on attention-controlled information processing. We conclude that early action perception is not immutable but shaped by the immediate visual context in which it appears, presumably reflecting infants’ ability to flexibly adjust stimulus processing to situational affordances.