Infants’ Anticipation of Others’ Action in Edited Film Sequences

Adults (Flanagan & Johnson, 2003), as well as 12-month-old babies (Falck-Ytter, Gredebaek & Hofsten, 2006) perform goal-directed, anticipatory eye movements when observing real and filmed actions performed by others. The study we will present aims to find out what happens when the observed action is presented in an edited film sequence. For anticipating future actions segmenting event into units is critical. Infants could use these initial groupings to discover more abstract cues to event structure, such as the actor’s intentions, which are known to play a role in adults’ global event segmentation (e.g., Wilder, 1978; Zacks, 2004; Zacks & Tversky, 2001).Visual sequence learning is a primary mechanism for event segmentation and research show that eight-month-old infants are sensitive to the sequential statistics of actions performed by a human agent (Roseberry et al., 2011). Adults (Baldwin, Andersson, Saffran, & Meyer, 2008) as well as infants in their 1st year of life (Stahl, Romberg, Roseberry, Golinkoff & Hirsh‐Pasek, 2014) can segment a continuous action sequence based on sequential predictability alone, which suggest that before infants have top-down knowledge of intentions, they may begin to segment events based on sequential predictability.

The stimuli used in the above mentioned infant studies present actions recorded from one camera angle in a single run (no cut). However in the commercial films –even the ones produced for very little ones- we see actions recorded from different angles and edited together later on. Regarding the fact that today many infants begin consistently watching television at 4 months of age (Christakis, 2011), become regular viewers when they are two years old and those exposed to television spend between 1 to 2 hours per day doing so (Zimmerman, Christakis & Meltzoff, 2007), it is important to understand how infants perceive televised actions and events as they are presented in popular media.

For the present study, we produced two sets of film clips depicting two conditions. In the first set of films an adult sitting in front of a table moved the objects placed to the one side of the table to the other side. In the second set of films, a child clapped her hands and stomped her feet in turn. In the Single Shot Condition, actions were shown in one long single shot. In the Multiple Shot Condition the actions were segmented into sub actions through multiple close-up shots. All film clips end with a long single shot paused after three repetitions of the actions (test shot) to measure anticipatory saccades. Infants (N=20) and adult controls (N=20) watched videos. Participant eye movements were recorded using a Tobii TX300. Analysis of gaze behaviour during this test shot showed clear anticipation in the adult control group in both conditions. Data collection for the infant sample is on-going but preliminary results indicate that 12 month-olds can successfully anticipate the actions in the unedited version but are less successful across edits