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Four studies investigated whether and when infants connect information about an actor's affect and perception to their action. Arguably, this may be a crucial way in which infants come to recognize the intentional behaviors of others. In Study 1 an actor grasped one of two objects in a situation where cues from the actor's gaze and expression could serve to determine which object would be grasped, specifically the actor first looked at and emoted positively about one object but not the other. Twelve-month-olds, but not 8-month-olds, recognized that the actor was likely to grasp the object which she had visually regarded with positive affect. Studies 2, 3, and 4 replicated the main finding from Study 1 with 12- and 14-month-olds and included several contrasting conditions and controls. These studies provide evidence that the ability to use information about an adult's direction of gaze and emotional expression to predict action is both present, and developing at the end of the first year of life. q 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

Considerable evidence has now accumulated that pre-verbal infants expect that an inanimate object can be caused to move only by physical contact. However, very few studies have investigated infants ’ expectations about the source of causal power. In 3 experiments, we found that (i) 10 and 12 month old infants expect a human hand, and not an inanimate object, as the primary cause of an inanimate object’s motion, (ii) the infants ’ expectations can lead them to infer a hidden causal agent without any direct perceptual evidence, and (iii) infants did not infer a hidden causal agent if the moving object was previously shown to be capable of self-generated motion. 2 Causal attributions are central to human cognition, underlying representations of concepts and intuitive theories (Carey, 1985; Gopnik et al., 2004; Keil, 1989; Murphy, 2002), supporting prediction of future events, and allowing effective intervention in the service of our goals. The capacity for causal attribution emerges early in infancy, and is embedded in at least two distinct domains of reasoning, reasoning about inanimate objects for which the cause of motion must

Preverbal infants can represent the causal structure of events, including distinguishing the agentive and receptive roles and categorizing entities according to stable causal dispositions. This study investigated how infants combine these 2 kinds of causal inference. In Experiments 1 and 2, 9.5-month-olds used the position of a human hand or a novel puppet (causal agents), but not a toy train (an inert object), to predict the subsequent motion of a beanbag. Conversely, in Experiment 3, 10- and 7-month-olds used the motion of the beanbag to infer the position of a hand but not of a toy block. These data suggest that preverbal infants expect a causal agent as the source of motion of an inert object.

Infants' developing causal expectations for the outcome of a simple tool-use event from ages 8 to 12 months were investigated. Causal expectations were studied by comparing infants' developing tool-use actions (i.e., as tool-use agents) with their developing perceptual reactions (i.e., as tool-use observers) to possible and impossible tool-use events. In Experiment 1, tool-use actions were studied by presenting infants, ages 8 and 12 months, with tool-use object-retrieval problems. In Experiment 2, a second age-matched sample of infants watched a comparable series of possible and impossible tool-use events in which a tool was used to retrieve a goalobject. Two core related findings were made. First, infants' causal action and causal perception develop in parallel. In both action and perception, supporting tool-use develops before surrounding tool-use. Second, infants' tool-use action develops before their causal perception of comparable tool-use events. The findings support the constru...

otion of Agency. The system I describe does not make explicit information of a biological character. I leave it as an open empirical question whether some other part of core systems, not explored here, represents biological information (see chapters by Keil and by Carey, this volume). The central part of the theory of cognitive development deals with core cognitive architecture---it characterises those properties of the information processing system that provide the basis for development, as opposed to those properties that are the result of development. For example, in classical associationism core cognition is assumed to consist purely of statistical associative processing over elementary "sensations". In other views, core architecture is assumed to have a more varied componential character. Core structure will, in the main, reflect specialization for carrying out particular information processing tasks as a result of adaptive evolution. From this point of view, Agents have provided

Visual object representation was studied in free-ranging rhesus monkeys. To facilitate comparison with humans, and to provide a new tool for neurophysiologists, we used a looking time procedure originally developed for studies of human infants. Monkeys' looking times were measured to displays with one or two distinct objects, separated or together, stationary or moving. Results indicate that rhesus monkeys used featural information to parse the displays into distinct objects, and they found events in which distinct objects moved together more novel or unnatural than events in which distinct objects moved separately. These findings show both commonalities and contrasts with those obtained from human infants. We discuss their implications for the development and neural mechanisms of higher-level vision. &

The influence of spatial context and the role of intentionality in the interpretation of animacy from motion