Infants’ representations of others’ goals: Representing approach over avoidance

Goals fall into two broad types – approach and avoidance. Research on infants’ early goal understanding has focused only on approach goals, usually assuming that infants will encode an ambiguous display where an actor picks one object over another as the actor wanting to approach the former rather than avoid the latter. We investigated infants’ understanding of approach and avoidance separately by presenting 7-month-olds with a hand either consistently approaching, or consistently avoiding, an object. Infants dishabituated to a disruption of the consistent approach pattern, but not of the consistent avoidance pattern. In the second experiment, we show that 14-month-olds, who have a richer understanding of goals, still do not dishabituate when a hand first reaches to and picks up an object it has consistently avoided before. A third experiment found that 7-month-olds successfully dishabituated to the first motion of a previously stationary object when all the objects moved on their own with no hand present, ruling out several low-level interpretations of infants’ failure to dishabituate to the violations of the avoidance pattern in Experiments 1 and 2. We conclude that infants do not represent avoidance from the same type of evidence they can use to represent approach.