Journal
PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE
Volume 11, Issue 1, Pages 73-77Publisher
SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC
DOI: 10.1111/1467-9280.00218
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Funding
- EUNICE KENNEDY SHRIVER NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF CHILD HEALTH &HUMAN DEVELOPMENT [R29HD035707, R01HD035707] Funding Source: NIH RePORTER
- NICHD NIH HHS [R29 HD035707-03, R29 HD035707, HD35707-01] Funding Source: Medline
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Two experiments assessed infants' understanding that actions that occur in sequence may be related to an overarching goal. Experiment 1 tested whether embedding an ambiguous action (touching the lid of a box) in a sequence that culminated with an action infants readily construe as goal-directed (grasping a toy inside the box) would alter infants' construal of the ambiguous action. Having seen the ambiguous action in this context, infants later construed this action in isolation as being directed at the toy within the box. Experiment 2 tested whether infants related the two actions on the basis of the temporal or the causal relation between them. When the causal relation was disrupted but the temporal relation was preserved, infants no longer related the two actions. These findings indicate that 12-month-old infants related single actions to overarching goals and that they do so by construing goal-directed action in a causal framework.
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