Infants track action goals within and across agents

The ability to understand that goals and other intentional relations are attributes of individual people is of fundamental importance to social life. It enables us to predict and interpret actions on-line by relating a person’s prior and current behaviors, and distinguishing them from the behaviors of other persons. In this paper, we consider the origins of the ability to mark goals as attributes of individual people. Using a visual habituation paradigm to assess infants’ tracking of goals, we tested whether infants represented goals are specific to particular agents. Thirteen-month-old infants restricted reaching goals to particular agents, but generalized a conventional linguistic action, labeling, across agents. Nine-month-old showed the former pattern but not the latter. We discuss these findings in the context of developing understandings of person specific and person general action knowledge.