Affordances, effectivities, and assisted imitation: Caregivers and the directing of attention

We focus on how infants’ discovery of a range of affordances and effectivities contributes to participating in a new activity. We emphasize how caregivers bracket ongoing actions with gestures that direct the infant's attention to perceptual information embodied in action sequences. Such supervised learning narrows the search space and enhances the speed of engaging adeptly in a new activity and provides a basis for achieving a common understanding of ongoing events. These caregiver practices during assisted imitation may illuminate how automata might detect and learn new affordances for action by observing and interacting with other intelligent agents.