The Early Understanding Goals in Social Contexts

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Recognizing animate entities and inferring their intentions, knowledge, and desires is ubiquitous, indeed necessary, in our daily lives. The study of the development of these cognitive capacities is an active and important research field, but the basic underlying mechanisms and precursors to our sophisticated adult abilities still remain largely unknown. The primary objective of the research program is to discover how infants detect and predict the goal-directed actions of others.***Through a series of experiments using eye-tracking procedures, the research program will build from the results of NSERC-funded research in my laboratory and those of others. In this past research, the ability of infants and young children to encode others' goals has been examined by measuring participants' responses to an experimenter's relatively stylized and pre-scripted action. With new head-mounted eye-tracking technologies, we are now able examine the processing of actions as they unfold within a dynamic interaction between individuals.***Leveraging experimental scenarios used previously in my laboratory and those of others, we will focus on two basic, yet highly important, human interactions: giving (an individual provides another individual with an object) and distributing (an individual allocates objects between two or more other individuals). Both types of interactions are within our species' broader suite of prosocial behaviours, which play an integral role in healthy relationships and peer acceptance.***Thus, the abilities explored in this program form the foundation of our everyday ability to make sense of others' actions, particularly those actions that underlie our ubiquitous prosocial behaviour. By understanding the development of these foundations, we will gain insight into the basic cognitive mechanisms that allow humans to engage in highly complex and flexible prosocial interactions, an area of interest for those in fields spanning developmental, clinical, and evolutionary psychology, education, economics, animal behaviour/cognition, and artificial intelligence, among others. Additionally, we will be better prepared to examine the disorders in which these abilities are impaired. **