Research
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What We Do
As adults, we are adept at explaining and understanding the behavior of other people around us. Key to this process is our ability to think about our own and other people's actions as guided or motivated by goals or intentions. For instance, upon seeing a woman reach toward a cookie jar, we go beyond focusing on the surface properties of the act (e.g., the speed and trajectory of the woman's reach) to interpret this action as directed toward the goal of obtaining a cookie. Our tendency to view action as motivated by goals is a powerful tool in our ability to navigate our social environment. It enables us to monitor and modify our own behavior, to predict the outcome of the actions of others, and to both teach and learn a variety of activities and skills. At the ECCL, we are interested in exploring the origins of the ability to represent human action in terms of goals and intentions. We do this by inviting infants and children (accompanied by their parents) to play age-appropriate and child-friendly games with us.
Our research is guided by 3 main questions:
1) How do infants represent their own and others' actions? When does an understanding of action, as guided by goals, develop?
2) What factors account for and contribute to changes in infants' and children's action representations?
3) How do infants and children remember and learn from their own and others' actions?
We primarily use 3 paradigms to address these questions:
1. Visual habituation paradigm: This paradigm capitalizes on infants' visual attention. We show infants an initial simple action event and time how long they look at this event. We then make two types of subtle changes to this initial event. We pit changes in surface features of the event against changes in the goal of the event to determine which of these types of changes infants are most interested in. For instance, after seeing an individual pull a cloth to attain an out of reach toy, we might show infants events in which the individual acts toward a new toy versus events in which the individual acts toward the same toy she had initially, but in a new way. Based on changes in infants' visual attention, we can infer whether or not infants appreciate that the actor's goal is to attain the toy.
2. Problem-solving paradigm: In this paradigm, infants are presented with a desirable toy that cannot be directly accessed. Instead, infants must perform an initial action on another object to obtain the toy (e.g., open a box to get a toy sitting inside it). We videotape infants while they attempt to solve these problems, and later code the strategies that infants use to act on the object and attain the toy. Based on their strategy use, we infer how focused and attentive infants are to the goal of the problem.
3. Memory for action paradigm: Preschool age children participate in a series of activities in collaboration with, or alongside an adult experimenter. Children are then asked to recall who did what during each of the activities and to reproduce what happened. We are interested in children's accuracy at recalling the source of their actions (who did what) and the content of their actions (what happened), as a means of assessing the impact of source recall on children's action representations.
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