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What do infants understand of others’ action? A theoretical account of early social cognition

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Abstract

Intention reading and action understanding have been reported in ever-younger infants. However, the notions of intention attribution and action understanding, as well as their relation to each other, are surrounded by much confusion, making it difficult to assess the meaning and value of such findings. In this paper we set out to clarify the notions of ‘action understanding’ and ‘intention attribution’. We will show that what is commonly referred to as ‘action understanding’ in fact encompasses various heterogeneous association and prediction mechanisms. In general, these forms of action understanding will not result in the attribution of an intention to an observed actor. By detaching intention attribution from action understanding, and by exposing the latter as an umbrella notion, we provide a theoretical framework on early social cognition that allows for better comparison of findings from different experimental paradigms, and better assessment of infant action understanding abilities. Taking into account the plurality of forms that action understanding can adopt will help cognitive neuroscience to gain a full understanding of the early roots of social cognition.

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Notes

  1. Mirror neuron studies, for example, suggest such an effect. Umiltà et al. (2001) showed that monkey’s were able to recognize a partly occluded grasping action only when the monkey knew that there was a graspable object behind the occluder.

  2. Note that in Woodward’s (1998) influential paradigm both interpretations of target are present, although only target objects are referred to as ‘goals’, while target locations are dubbed ‘locations’.

  3. The objection that only one of the actions is consciously performed, while the rest is not, is highly problematic, as many of our everyday actions (i.e. getting the mail, getting coffee, locking the door), seem to be performed highly automatized. These actions are on most accounts still considered to be intentional.

  4. There could be, however, an important role for these explicitly (verbally) represented intentions, such as “I will visit my mother this weekend”. These representations could allow more temporally extended action control, by functioning as a guidepost around which the more dynamic processes are structured. Also, and obviously, when these verbally represented goals are broadcasted, they can perform a social function. These functions should emphatically not be interpreted as a single top-down causal role, as posited in folk readings of intentions.

  5. It is still a matter of debate to what extent action mirroring is a mechanism for action understanding, a mechanism for generating appropriate responses, or simply a byproduct of perceptually coding someone’s actions (see Hickock (2009) for a critical evaluation). In this paper, we just want to mention the possibility of such a mechanism informing other types of understanding, and generating certain responses (e.g. generating an action response, directing gaze), thereby influencing the interpretation of the observed action. We do not want to give an overview of the controversy, nor take a stance on it.

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Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Dan Burnston, Stuart Hammond, Pim Haselager, Nina Kühn-Popp, Sheila Krogh-Jespersen and Marc Slors for commenting on earlier drafts of the manuscript.

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  1. Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University Nijmegen, PO Box 9104, 6500 HE, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

    Sebo Uithol

  2. Dipartimento di Neuroscienze, Sezione di Fisiologia, Universitá degli Studi di Parma, Via Volturno 39, 43120, Parma, Italy

    Sebo Uithol

  3. Section Developmental Psychology, Ludwig Maximilian University, Leopoldstr. 13, 80802, Munich, Germany

    Markus Paulus

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Uithol, S., Paulus, M. What do infants understand of others’ action? A theoretical account of early social cognition. Psychological Research 78, 609–622 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-013-0519-3

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