Getting a grip on early intention understanding: The role of motor, cognitive, and social factors

Abstract

This chapter considers various factors that facilitate infants' understanding of other people's intentions. As adults, we view the actions people perform around us as intentional, to achieve a goal, rather than idle movements. For example, when observing another person perform a simple grasping action, such as picking up a slice of pizza, we perceive this action as goal-directed. Due to our understanding of the person's intention, we focus more so on the relation between the person and their goal, rather than the motion involved in the action. Infants develop an understanding of intentional agents and their goals within the first year of life. This chapter reviews multiple factors that are at play in facilitating infants' learning about the intentions of others' actions. We consider this from various perspectives, including the role of active experience, sensitivity to behavioral cues, cognitive factors, and social factors. We first review evidence concerning infants' learning of intentional actions from active experience. We then go on to evaluate how this learning could also come about via comparison processes, statistical learning, and use of behavioral cues such as object labeling and action effects. We also review social factors such as infant-directed actions and triadic engagement within social interactions that emerging evidence suggests are helpful in facilitating infants' understanding of other people's actions. Finally, we consider the extent to which these factors interact with one another in different contexts, as well as implications and future directions.

Keywords: Action; Active experience; Behavioral cues; Comparison; Infant-directed action; Intention understanding; Motor skill; Statistical learning; Triadic engagement.