Poster workshop discussion
Chairs: Amanda L. Woodward and Beate Sodian
Discussant: Beate Sodian
Infant representations of action likely lay the groundwork for language,intentional understanding, social competence, and problem solving, amongother critical abilities. Currently, researchers are investigatinginfants' action representations from many different vantage points. Theseresearchers start from several distinct theoretical backgrounds and bringto bear a range of empirical methods. This poster workshop aims atbringing together several diverse lines of research, with the goals of bothsurveying the current empirical landscape and promoting contact betweendifferent vantage points on the phenomenon. To this end, we have broughttogether 11 researchers who span a range of questions and methods instudying infants' action representations. The posters in this workshopspeak to four interrelated sets of issues.One set of issues concerns when and how infants begin to conceive of othersas intentional beings, acting in a purposeful way towards objects and otherpeople. A traditional approach to this question focuses on infants'understanding of social-communicative intentional actions such as gaze andpointing. Traditionally, this understanding has been tapped byinvestigating infants' developing competencies in triadic interaction. Recently, several laboratories have begun to use visual habituationmeasures as an additional source of evidence about infants' knowledge ofthese actions. Several posters in the workshop take one or both of theseapproaches in studying normally developing infants as well as children withautism. In addition, several posters consider other potential hallmarks ofintentional understanding including knowledge about the object-directednessof actions and knowledge about action as a means to an end.The second set of issues concerns infants' knowledge about the structure offamiliar intentional actions such as pointing, gaze, emotional expressions,and giving. Several posters describe work that taps infants'representations of these actions, asking whether infants represent theelements of the action that are critical from an adult standpoint. Thesestudies provide evidence on infants' ability to learn about particularactions, the structure of infants' action categories, and the prelinguisticknowledge that provides a basis for both language learning and furtherdevelopments in intentional understanding.The third set of issues concerns infants' ability to encode novel actionsin a way that will facilitate further analysis. Are infants able to parsethe ongoing stream of events into units that correspond to intentionalunits from an adult standpoint? What are the perceptual cues that underliethis parsing ability? Posters in the workshop provide evidence on thesequestions, as well as evidence on infants' ability to use means-endrelations to interpret novel actions. The fourth set of issues concerns the relation between infants' actionrepresentations and their category knowledge about agents and objects. Actions relate agents to objects. How does infants' understanding ofaction provide a basis for reasoning about agents and the objects they acton? First, does the presence of actions such as social reciprocity andgiving lead infants to infer that a novel object is an agent? And second,does infants' knowledge about objects include an understanding of the waysin which agents typically act on them? Posters in the workshop addressthese questions.In summary, the present posters address a wide range of important issues inthe fast developing field of infant action knowledge. The poster workshopoffers the opportunity for researchers from across this field to sharefindings and perspective on the issues, as well as an opportunity forothers to survey the findings and debates in the field.
Details of individual items:
poster WS disc