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.