Infants’ understanding of intention from 10 to 14 months: Interrelations among violation of expectancy and imitation tasks

The present study examined infants’ understanding of other people's intentional actions. The primary goal was to investigate whether infants’ performances on visual attention and imitation tasks that have been designed to tap understanding of intentional actions were interrelated. Infants completed a goal-detection task and an action-parsing task at 10 months. At 14 months, infants completed a behavioral re-enactment task and a selective action imitation task that required infants to differentiate intentional from accidental actions. Infants’ concurrent performances on visual attention tasks were linked; however, no association was found between their performances on imitation tasks. Importantly, infants’ behaviors on the visual attention tasks predicted their performance on the imitation tasks at 14 months. These findings provide the first evidence that there is developmental continuity in infants’ understanding of intentional action from 10 to 14 months.