Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The ability to predict others actions is fundamental to successful joint action, communication, and theory of mind. Re-search has shown that infants predict other peoples actions across a variety of laboratory tasks. However, it is unknownwhether the action prediction skills that infants demonstrate during screen-based eye-tracking tasks scale up to real-lifeaction contexts, and whether they relate to general learning abilities. To address these questions, we used head-mountedeye-tracking to investigate action prediction and visual sequence learning during live parent-child interactions. Findingsreveal that 18-month-old infants predict reaching actions during the majority of trials, and that their gaze latencies becomefaster as they learn 3-step action sequences. These findings demonstrate that infants can learn sequence regularities andanticipate the actions of other people in live, naturalistic contexts, as they have been shown to do in traditional laboratorycontexts. This research contributes new insight into early cognitive and social development.