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 12months 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 goaldirected 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 testevents 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
