Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Developmental theory considers action prediction as one of several processes involved in determining how infants come to perceive and understand social events (Gredebäck & Daum, 2015). Action prediction is observed from early in life and is considered an important social-cognitive skill. However, knowledge about infant action prediction is limited to evidence from screen-based eye-tracking tasks. Little is known about action prediction in real-life action contexts. Our aim in the current study was to provide new evidence on whether and how infants anticipate actions in free-flowing parent-child interaction. Using dual head-mounted eye- tracking, we analyzed infants’ visual anticipations of their parents’ reaching actions while they played with objects together. Findings reveal that infants anticipate their parents’ actions at a rate higher than would be expected by chance.