Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Human beings act in and interact with their social environment. Accordingly, it is of special importance not only to understand other individuals' actions, goals, and desires, but also to be able to perform one's own actions, to achieve goals, and to express desires. Understanding other people's actions and knowing how those actions can be linked to our own actions is crucial to our social interaction. Infants are more interactive than one might think. They have intense exchanges with their environment long before they can ever talk; and it seems that infants are especially interested in learning about actions - others', their own and the outcomes of them. In their first year of life, they learn about actions while watching others and their own actions affect how interested they are in those made by others. Understanding this two-way relationship is a key to more advanced understanding of actions, goals and communication. The proposed research program will focus on this relationship. Especially, it will look at how infants' perceptual and motor development affects how they perform their own actions and how they learn to understand the actions others make. Actions are something special for humans and, above all, infants are interested in biological partners. This research program will look at infants' knowledge about biological movements, like grasping, crawling, and walking. How is this knowledge related to what they are able to do on their own? When infants start to move on their own, they discover new possibilities and new features of their surroundings. Research will concentrate on the relationship of new motor skills to more general capacities. Use of eye-tracking and video technology will enable research of how features of action understanding, motor development, and body knowledge are linked to infants' cognitive development.