Triadic Interactions Support Infants’ Emerging Understanding of Intentional Actions

• In Event: 1-145 - Mechanisms Underlying the Development of Action Understanding in Infancy

Integrative Statement

During the first year of life, infants develop the capacity to interpret others’ actions in terms of their underlying intentions and use this understanding prospectively to generate predictions about behavior (Woodward et al., 2009). A key question for developmental psychologists is where these foundational social-cognitive abilities originate and what mechanisms explain their development.

One likely source of information regarding others’ intentionality is infants’ interactions with social partners—in particular, triadic interactions in which infants coordinate attention between a social partner and an object of mutual interest (also referred to as joint attention or joint engagement). Several prominent theories of social-cognitive development propose that experience in triadic interaction facilitates infants’ emerging understanding of intentionality (Barresi & Moore, 1996; Carpendale & Lewis, 2004; Hobson, 2002). On this view, when infants participate in triadic interactions in which their own actions are aligned with and directed at the same object as their social partner’s, it creates the conditions necessary to gain insight into their own and others’ intentionality. Despite the prominence of these claims, however, few studies have directly tested them (see Brandone, 2015; Brune & Woodward, 2007; and Dunphy-Lelii et al., 2014 for initial correlational evidence).

Here we present two studies systematically investigating whether triadic engagement serves as a mechanism in the development of intentional action understanding. Both studies assessed relations between infants’ spontaneous tendency to engage in triadic interactions with a researcher during a play task (Carpenter et al., 1998) and their ability to visually predict the outcome of ongoing intentional reaching actions (Brandone et al., 2014). In Study 1 (N = 88), we established these relations in a concurrent design with infants at 8 to 9 months of age. In Study 2 (N = 114), we used a longitudinal design to examine whether the tendency to engage in triadic interaction at 6 to 7 months predicted intention understanding roughly three months later.

Study 1 revealed that 8- and 9-month-olds (M = 8.72) who initiated more bouts of triadic engagement showed better concurrent reasoning about the goal of an intentional reaching action (see Table 1). Study 2 confirmed these findings longitudinally and demonstrated that infants who initiated more bouts of triadic engagement at 6 to 7 months (M = 6.86) were better at prospectively reasoning about the goal of an intentional action roughly three months later (M = 9.81). Cross-lagged path analyses revealed that intentional action understanding at 6 to 7 months did not predict later triadic engagement, suggesting that early triadic engagement supports later intentional action processing and not the other way around (see Figure 1).

Together, these studies provide important insight into how infants use their rich social context to build an understanding of intentional action. Our findings suggest that infants’ accumulating experiences in triadic interactions create powerful opportunities for learning about intentionality, likely paving the way for the development of a more complex, mentalistic understanding of the social world.

Authors

• Amanda C Brandone, Lehigh University
  Presenting Author

• Wyntre Stout, Lehigh University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Kelsey Moty, New York University
  Non-Presenting Author