Monroy, C. 1, 2 , Gerson, S. 1, 2 & Hunnius, S. 1, 2
1 Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour
2 Radboud University Nijmegen
Young infants are sensitive to statistical regularities within sequences of human action. In a novel eye-tracking paradigm, we studied whether infants accurately predict future actions and their effects based on statistical regularities. In two conditions, 18-month-old participants watched either an action sequence performed by a human agent or a self-propelled visual event sequence. Infants learned the transitional probabilities between actions and made spatially accurate visual anticipations to upcoming actions. Crucially, infants demonstrated effects of learning when the sequence was performed by a human actor, but not when they observed self-propelled visual events. Our findings suggest that infants gain unique information from the statistical properties of observed human actions and use this information to guide their predictions about subsequent actions. Further, we found a link between observational learning and infants? own action production, which was constrained by both agency and action effects. Currently we are conducting ongoing studies to further investigate the underlying mechanisms that drive these effects. The implications of this research suggest that statistical regularities in dynamic human action provide a powerful learning opportunity for infants, which supports the ability to generate predictions about future events.