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Action prediction during real-time parent-infant interactions

Monroy, Claire; Chen, Chi-Hsin; Houston, Derek; Yu, Chen

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Authors

Chi-Hsin Chen

Derek Houston

Chen Yu



Abstract

Social interactions provide a crucial context for early learning and cognitive development during infancy. Action prediction—the ability to anticipate an observed action—facilitates successful, coordinated interaction and is an important social-cognitive skill in early development. However, current knowledge about infant action prediction comes largely from screen-based laboratory tasks. We know little about what infants’ action prediction skills look like during real-time, free-flowing interactions with a social partner. In the current study, we used head-mounted eyetracking to quantify 9-month-old infants’ visual anticipations of their parents’ actions during free-flowing parent–child play. Our findings reveal that infants do anticipate their parents’ actions during dynamic interactions at rates significantly higher than would be expected by chance. In addition, the frequency with which they do so is associated with child-led joint attention and hand-eye coordination. These findings are the first to reveal infants’ action prediction behaviors in a more naturalistic context than prior screen-based studies, and they support the idea that action prediction is inherently linked to motor development and plays an important role in infants’ social-cognitive development. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HrmcicfiqE

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Sep 29, 2020
Online Publication Date Oct 8, 2020
Publication Date 2021
Publicly Available Date Mar 28, 2024
Journal Developmental Science
Print ISSN 1363-755X
Publisher Wiley
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 24
Issue 3
Article Number e13042
Pages 1-12
DOI https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.13042
Publisher URL https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/desc.13042

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