Perceptual Narrowing in Human Action Perception: Mechanisms and Functions

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Humans possess sophisticated social cognition: mental processes that aid in understanding and predicting the behaviours of other individuals. These processes, however, revolve around a central ability to perceive the actions of others as stimuli. Thus, from a developmental perspective, the study of infants' action perception is critical to understanding early social cognition more broadly. The current proposal seeks to expand our knowledge of how action perception develops over the first year of infancy. Recent work suggests that within the first year infants develop a perceptual bias when they observe others acting in the world: they pay more attention to information about how other people grasp objects over other dimensions of action. The studies in the proposed research will investigate a potential causal mechanism in the development of this bias: infants' self-generated motor experience. The proposed studies will also investigate whether the development of this bias is tied to improvements in infants' action perception and cognition. Specifically, they will examine whether this bias is related to enhancements in grasping perception, improvements in goal understanding and action prediction, and increases in the flexibility of attention during action perception. Such developments would improve the efficiency of action perception, which would also benefit infants' overall cognitive development, as infants acquire considerable information about the physical and social world through their observation of others.******This research has broad implications for the study of perceptual development, as the development of action perception may share similarities with development in other domains, such as speech or face perception. It also specifically informs theories of early social cognition, which lack specificity in describing the underlying mechanisms that drive the development of goal understanding and action prediction; the current proposal will evaluate how infants' self-generated experience can act as such a mechanism. Finally, as this research will shed light on developmental processes that ultimately set the stage for more complex social cognitive achievements (e.g., theory of mind), it also has implications for developmental disorders in which social cognition is impaired (e.g., autism).