Six-month-olds actively predict others’ goal-directed actions

• Six-month-olds can encode and predict the goal of others’ grasping actions.
• Infants can predict others’ actions even before actions are initiated.
• Infants can exploit others’ visual experiences when predicting others’ actions.

The current experiment investigated whether 6-month-olds can predict the goal of others’ actions. Infants were familiarized to an actor repeatedly reaching for and grasping object-A as opposed to object-B. Object-B was either (1) visible to the actor; (2) hidden by an opaque screen from the actor (but not the infants); or (3) placed behind the screen by the actor herself, so that even though she could no longer see object-B, she was aware of its presence. The positions of the two objects were then reversed. During the test trial, we measured the infants’ eye fixations while the actor paused for 6 s. The infants generated predictive eye movements toward object-A only when the actor could see object-B (1) or was aware of its presence in the situation (3). Thus, 6-month-olds can predict, rather than only retrospectively respond to, the goal objects of others’ actions.