A Puzzle about Goal Tracking
Lecturer: Stephen A. Butterfill
Why is some, but not all, of nine-month-olds’ goal tracking limited by their abilities to represent actions motorically at the time of observing an action?
Slides
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Notes
An early breakthrough by Gergely, Nadasky, Csibra, & Biro (1995) demonstrates that older infants can track the goals of actions performed by geometric shapes. These include expanding, contracting and bouncing over a high wall—all things few infants can do.
These findings have been extensively replicated and extended (see Csibra, 2003; Gergely & Csibra, 2003 for reviews). Importantly for our purposes, much the same findings can be observed with younger, 9-month-old infants (Hernik & Southgate, 2012) and even 6.5-month-old infants (Csibra, 2008). Related observations indicate that even 3-month-olds may be capable of extracting goal-related information from displays involving simple geometric shapes (Luo, 2011).
If we take both this evidence and also the evidence about limits mentioned in Limits on Infant Goal Tracking at face value, we arrive at a puzzling conclusion:
For infants in the first nine months of life, some, but not all, of their goal tracking is limited by their abilities to represent actions motorically in this way: they can only track the goals of an action if they can represent a similar enough action motorically at the time the action occurs.
Why is this puzzling? We need to understand why this pattern of limits exists. But we cannot explain it by appeal to the Simple View (from The Teleological Stance): that View predicts no such limits. And we cannot explain it by appeal to the Developmental Motor Conjecture (from The Motor Theory of Goal Tracking), which predicts inescapable limits. So no theory of pure goal-tracking can explain earliest infants’ abilities.
Appendix: Another Puzzle
Daum, Attig, Gunawan, Prinz, & Gredeback (2012) created a modified version of Woodward’s paradigm which allowed them to measure two different responses to a single scenario, anticipatory looking and dishabituation. Their modified paradigm involved cartoon fish moving in ways which infants (and probably adults too) are unlikely to represent motorically. They found evidence for goal tracking by nine-month-olds in their dishabituation responses but not in their anticipatory looking. In fact, the nine-month-olds’ anticipatory looking indicated that they expected the fish to move along the same path irrespective of any more distal goal it might have; and it was only the three-year-olds (not the one- or two-year-olds) whose anticipatory looking indicated goal tracking.%
Gredebäck & Melinder (2010) also found evidence of goal tracking in six-month-olds’ pupil dilation but not their anticipatory looking.
Why does nine-month-olds’ goal tracking sometimes manifest itself in dishabituation (or pupil dilation) but not anticipatory looking?