The role of the efficiency of novel actions in infants' goal anticipation

In two experiments, we recorded infants' eye movements to test whether the efficiency of the action influences infants' ability to anticipate the outcome of an ongoing action performed by abstract figures. In Experiment 1, we found that predictive eye movements were elicited by both nonefficient and efficient actions, but anticipation of the outcome occurred much earlier in the efficient action condition. Experiment 2 was designed to test the effect of saliency of the goal and the possibility that automatic extrapolation of the movement was partly responsible for the predictive gaze shifts in Experiment 1. We found that when automatic extrapolation was prevented and the goal was not salient, infants showed predictive gaze shifts only in the efficient action condition. Taken together, our findings support the importance of teleological inferences in anticipating the goals of ongoing actions. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.