RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 10-Month-Old Infants Are Sensitive to the Time Course of Perceived Actions: Evidence From a Study Combining Eye-tracking and EEG
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 131516
DO 10.1101/131516
A1 Cathleen Bache
A1 Anne Springer
A1 Hannes Noack
A1 Waltraud Stadler
A1 Franziska Kopp
A1 Ulman Lindenberger
A1 Markus Werkle-Bergner
YR 2017
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/04/28/131516.abstract
AB Research has shown that infants are able to track a moving target efficiently – even if it is transiently occluded from sight. This basic ability allows prediction of when and where events happen in everyday life. Yet, it is unclear whether, and how, infants internally represent the time course of ongoing movements to derive predictions. In this study, 10-month-old crawlers observed the video of a same-aged crawling baby that was transiently occluded and reappeared in either a temporally continuous or non-continuous manner (i.e., delayed by 500 ms vs. forwarded by 500 ms relative to the real-time movement). Eye movement and rhythmic neural brain activity (EEG) were measured simultaneously. Eye movement analyses showed that infants were sensitive to slight temporal shifts in movement continuation after occlusion. Furthermore, brain activity related to sensorimotor rather than mnemonic processing differed between observation of continuous and non-continuous movements. Early sensitivity to an action’s timing may hence be explained within the internal real-time simulation account of action observation. Overall, the results support the hypothesis that 10-month-old infants are well prepared for internal representation of the time course of observed movements that are within the infants’ current motor repertoire.