Developmental psychologists assume that infants understand other persons’ actions after and because they understand their own (“Like-me” perspective). However, there is another possibility as well, namely that infants come to understand their own actions after and because they understand other persons’ actions (“Like-you” perspective). We reviewed infant research on the influence of perceived actions on self-performed actions as well as the reverse. Furthermore, we investigated the interplay between both aspects of action understanding by means of a sequence variation. The results show the impact of agentive experience for action understanding, but not the reverse. The question whether infants’ perceived and to-be-produced actions share common representations of the perceptual and the motor system is discussed in relation to its implications for the social making of minds.
2014. Is selective attention the basis for selective imitation in infants? An eye-tracking study of deferred imitation with 12-month-olds. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 124 ► pp. 18 ff.
Mack, Wolfgang
2009. Self-objectivation and sharing mental control as a social part of self-consciousness. Evidence from social development of human infants. In Social Roots of Self-Consciousness, ► pp. 141 ff.
Malle, Bertram F.
2008. The Fundamental Tools, and Possibly Universals, of Human Social Cognition. In Handbook of Motivation and Cognition Across Cultures, ► pp. 267 ff.
Meltzoff, Andrew N.
2007. The ‘like me’ framework for recognizing and becoming an intentional agent. Acta Psychologica 124:1 ► pp. 26 ff.
Paulus, Markus, Sabine Hunnius, Marlies Vissers & Harold Bekkering
2011. Imitation in Infancy: Rational or Motor Resonance?. Child Development 82:4 ► pp. 1047 ff.
Paulus, Markus, Sabine Hunnius, Marlies Vissers & Harold Bekkering
2011. Bridging the gap between the other and me: the functional role of motor resonance and action effects in infants’ imitation. Developmental Science 14:4 ► pp. 901 ff.
Perner, Josef, Eugenia Kulakova & Eva Rafetseder
2022. Developing Theory of Mind and Counterfactual Reasoning in Children. In The Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Development, ► pp. 408 ff.
Reid, Vincent, Daniel Stahl & Tricia Striano
2010. The presence or absence of older siblings and variation in infant goal-directed motor development. International Journal of Behavioral Development 34:4 ► pp. 325 ff.
Reid, Vincent M., Katharina Kaduk & Judith Lunn
2019. Links between action perception and action production in 10-week-old infants. Neuropsychologia 126 ► pp. 69 ff.
2013. Relations between 18-month-olds’ gaze pattern and target action performance: A deferred imitation study with eye tracking. Infant Behavior and Development 36:4 ► pp. 736 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 31 march 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.