Infant’s perception of goal-directed actions on video Tanja Hofer1& Petra Hauf & Gisa Aschersleben

Introduction; Nowadays television is a prominent factor in infants’ lives. There has been an increase in the number of children’s and infants’ educational and entertaining programmes such as,Sesame Street, Teletubbies and Baby Einstein. Although past research has shown that television can influence the development of toddlers and children both positively and negatively there is little research on the possible impact of television on infants’ learning or its implications for their subsequent cognitive and social development (Anderson & Pempek, 2005). Imitation studies and object search studies show that infants have difficulties using action information presented on video to guide their own behaviour.

The present study investigated whether infants also have problems interpreting information shown on video relative to real live information. It was examined whether 6-month-olds interpret an action with a salient action effect as goal-directed when it is performed by an actor on a video-screen and when it is performed by a live actor. There is various studies on infants’ ability to learn from video use imitation of televised behaviour as a method. These studies are concerned with the core question of whether infants treat video images as ‘social partners’ and draw implications for their own actions after observing the actions presented on video.

According to the findings; 36-month olds imitate a video model as frequently as a live model (McCall, Parke, & Kavanaugh,1977) 18- to 30-month-olds infants are able to imitate actions presented on video even after a 24-hour interval, although these infants did not achieve the same performance level as demonstrated after live demonstration. And the ability of 14- and 15-month-olds infants reproduce target actions immediately after watching them on video is similar to their ability to imitate the same actions modeled live (Barr & Hayne, 1999; Meltzoff, 1988).

Klein, Hauf, and Aschersleben (2006) suggest that infants can imitate simple action steps from a model presented on video already at 12- months of age. However, infants’ amount of imitation following video demonstration was slightly lower compared with their performance after watching a live model. the above results show that although infants can imitate simple actions from video models already early in life, they seem to have difficulties using a video image as a symbol representing the current reality before 30 months of age. There is evidence that young infants respond meaningfully to pictorial or mediated symbols. For example, infants are able to recognize objects and people depicted in pictures from as young as 5 months of age (DeLoache, Strauss, & Maynard, 1979).

Also,recent studies investigated whether 9- and 10 month olds can use emotional reactions of a model presented on video to guide their behaviour (Barna &Legerstee, 2005; Mumme & Fernald, 2003). Findings provide initial evidence that 9- to 10 month olds are able to draw inferences that are relevant to their own behaviour from the emotional expressions of a video model. Taken together, these findings indicate that infants can, to some extent, interpret and use information presented on television and in video clips from very early in life. in the present study we investigated 6-month-olds infants’ ability to interpret a simple but unfamiliar action as goal-directed depending on whether they watched the action live or from pre-recorded videotapes. Making sense of bodily motions in daily experience requires an appreciation at some level of the goals of others’actions, as well as their possible outcomes and consequences.

Woodward (1998) demonstrated that 5- and 6-month-olds may interpret human grasping movements as goal-directed. However, 5- to 9-month-olds did not show this pattern when the grasping human hand was replaced by an unfamiliar action of a human agent, consisting of dropping the back of the hand on the object or when the grasping human hand was replaced by inanimate or ambiguous agents. Woodward suggested that infant’s understanding of actions as goal- directed is constrained by familiarity and experience with human actions and that infants’ do not extend this understanding to similar motions of inanimate agents.

Method ; 6-month-olds infants were divided into two groups according to two different presentation forms Both groups were presented with a paradigm adopted from Kira´ly et al. (2003) that showed a goal directed action sequence resulting in a salient action effect (displacement of an object). One group of 6-month-olds infants was presented with the actions on a video-screen. Another group of infants was presented with the same action displays and experimental procedure matched for all-important features live on a stage (live group).

We were interested in finding whether 6-month-olds infants would interpret an unfamiliar action resulting in a salient action effect as goal-directed when the action is shown on a video-screen as well as performed by a live actor and whether the looking behaviour of both groups would be comparable or different from each other. If both groups reveal similar looking behaviour consistent with an understanding of goal directedness, this would provide evidence that young infants perceive information presented on video, make sense of this information, and interpret a video event in the same way as a live event. There was 32 in each of two groups. In the video group, there were 21 girls and 11 boys between the ages of 5.16 and 6.16 months. The live group consisted of 22 girls and 10 boys, aged between 5 months 28 days and 6 months 16 days.

Infant on parent’s lap facing the computer screen (A) and infant in front of the live stage (B). Two target objects whose weight was adjusted to be the same were arranged on the stage: a yellow duck and a multicoloured wooden tower. The objects were placed on a black cardboard, decorated with four grey circles arranged in a square, two at the front and two at the back. At the beginning of each trial the objects were positioned on the two circles nearer to the infants. The video presentation and the order of the action events were controlled by a computer programme.

Attention-grabbing phase At the beginning they produced an attention-grabbing video clip lasting for about 19s. This served to calibrate of infants’ looking patterns. Familiarization phase At the start of each trial, a blue curtain appeared on the screen for 3s and infants simultaneously heard a voice from loudspeakers saying ‘Schau mal.After 3s, the curtain disappeared and infants saw the stage with the two objects that were positioned on the two circles closer to the infant for 2.5s. Then, an actor’s right arm, dressed in a light grey shirt, and her bare hand moved through the curtains. In each trial, the actor’s arm appeared from the right side of the stage, lowered the back of the right hand onto one of the two objects, made contact with the object and pushed it smoothly to a designated position at the rear part of the stage.

This sequence was repeated six times. Following the last familiarization trial, infants saw one trial in which the positions of the objects had been reversed in order to familiarize infants with the new arrangement (position change trial) This trial was presented without any action (the arm did not emerge on the stage)and ended according to the same criterion.

Results ; Familiarization phase The comparison between the first three and the last three familiarization trials revealed a significant decrease in looking-time for both group’s, indicating that infants indeed became familiar with the action sequences during the familiarization phase. Infants in the live group looked significantly longer, during the first three familiarization trials than infants did in the video group. Thus, infants in the live group were more attentive at the beginning of the familiarization phase. However, infants in both groups were equally attentive at the end of the familiarization trials.

6-month-olds infants in the video group looked longer when the actor’s goal object had changed than at a change in the motion path. Moreover, a second group of 6-month-olds who had viewed the action displays, matched for all-important features, as a live presentation on a stage, also looked longer at object change trials than at path change trials during the test phase. Taken together, when familiarized to the videotaped or live presented human action, in the subsequent test phase in both groups infants looked longer when they were presented with a change in the goal object than with a change in the motion path.

This result was underscored by the finding that, in both groups, a greater proportion of infants spent a longer time looking at the object change test-event than at the path change test-event. Moreover, comparing the results across the two-presentation form groups, video vs. live revealed no difference in the overall looking pattern. Thus, independent of whether infants watched the back-of-hand action presented live or on video they interpreted it as goal-directed and hence there was no difference in absolute looking-times between-groups. Discussion As already pointed out by Woodward (e.g. 1998, 2005), the duration of looking at the two kinds of test-events provides an indication as to how infants represent the familiarization event. If infants look longer at test- events with a new motion path, this suggests that they encoded the familiarization events mainly in terms of spatiotemporal properties.

Alternatively, if infants look longer at test-events with a new goal object, this suggests that they encoded the familiarization events in terms of the goal of the actor. Thus, the change in goal object is only remarkable if the behavior is understood as establishing a relationship between the actor and the object. Findings that both groups of 6-month-olds looked longer in object change trials than in path change trials suggests that infants understand the back-of-hand movement as a goal-directed action. In light of these results it seems remarkable that although infants’ imitation of actions from live models and video clips emerges early, their performance with televised information lags always a bit behind imitation performance with live models (Barr, Dowden, & Hayne, 1996; Barr & Hayne, 1999; Herbert, Gross, & Hayne, 2006; Klein et al., 2006; Muentener et al., 2004).

Similarly, it is only at around 30 months that children are able to understand the representational nature of television and video images, and to use them as a source of information in order to guide their own behaviour in their real surroundings (e.g. Troseth & DeLoache, 1998). At this point, they only speculate about possible underlying reasons for infants’ positive performance in interpreting televised behaviour and infants’ inferior use of televised behaviour as a source of information to guide their own behaviour in the real world. Infants in our task had only to observe, and to interpret, the human behaviour and not to match the televised actions to their own action repertoire in the real world. Thus, it seems that this transfer from observed televised behaviour to the real world causes difficulties for infants and young children. There are various possible explanations of these findings.

Findings from the familiarization phase of both groups seem to support to some extent, Hayne et al. (2003) and Barr and Hayne’s (1999) argument that infants may have difficulties in learning from video displays because their attention is not so focused, as focused as with live demonstrations. Nevertheless, the findings indicate that 6-month-olds infants interpret actions shown as video images in the same way as when they are presented live, and that for the perceptual and interpretational processes it seems not to be too critical that video images provide a somewhat limited and in some cues degraded image of reality. Infants seem to be able to capture meaningful contents of video presentations at a very young age, although these infants show difficulties when they have to guide their behaviour on the basis of such information.

Thankyou for listening Alev Gündost