How do we know what babies are thinking?

Looking
In many of our studies, we simply record how long babies look at events. These studies are based on a simple premise that is true for both babies and adults. If you see an event numerous times, your interest in it will decline. This is called habituation. But when a new event is seen, your interest level will increase. This is called dishabituation. We show babies the same event happening over and over again. Once they habituate to the event, as measured by their decreased looking time, we make changes to the original event. Because we know that infants will look longer at an event which seems new to them, we can use their attention to the changed events as evidence about the kinds of changes infants notice.

We show babies simple events, such as an adult looking at and then reaching toward an object. We present these events in a "baby theater", either acted out by a person in the room, or on a video screen. Having shown the baby one event during habituation, we then show test events that vary the physical structure of the event or the actor's apparent intentions. If babies look longer when the actor's intentions change, then this suggests they understood the action as intentional.

Imitation
Babies tend to imitate the actions of others. This is very obvious in toddlers, who often mimic adult behavior. But the same tendency can be seen in even younger infants under very sensitive testing conditions. In some of our studies, we investigate whether babies will imitate an adult's actions, and, if so, whether they imitate the apparent goal of the action. For example, if a baby sees an adult reach up to grasp a toy high on a shelf, the baby might imitate the motion of the adult's arm or might instead imitate the goal of the action (getting the toy).
In these studies, babies interact with an adult experimenter who models an action and then give the baby the chance to imitate it. To illustrate, the baby might see the adult look at and then reach toward one of two toys. Then, the baby will be given the chance to choose between the toys. We predict that if infants understand the adult's goal in reaching, they will be more likely to select the toy that was the goal of the adult's action.

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Publications

• Guajardo, J. J., & Woodward, A. L. (2004). Is agency skin-deep? Surface attributes influence infants' sensitivity to goal-directed action, Infancy , 6, 361-384.
• Hamlin, J. K., Hallinan, E.V., & Woodward, A. L. (in press). Do as I do: 7-month-old infants selectively reproduce others' goals. Developmental Science.
• Buresh, J. S. & Woodward, A. L. (2007). Infants track action goals within and across agents. Cognition.
• Brune, C. W., & Woodward, A. L. (2007). Social cognition and social responsiveness in 10-month-old infants. Journal of Cognition and Development. 2(8), 3-27.
• Woodward, A.L. (2000). Constraining the problem space in early word learning. In R. Golinkoff & K. Hirsh-Pasek (eds.), Becoming a word learner: A debate on lexical acquisition (pp. 81-144). New York: Oxford University Press.
• Couillard, N.L., & Woodward A.L. (1999). Children’s comprehension of deceptive points. British Journal of Developmental Psychology.17, 515-521.
• Woodward, A.L. (2005). Infants’ understanding of the actions involved in joint attention. In N.Eilan, C. Hoerl, T. McCormack and J. Roessler (eds.). Joint Attention:Communication and other minds. (pp. 110–128). New York: Oxford University Press.
• Sommerville, J.A. & Woodward, A.L. (2005). Infants’ sensitivity to the causal features of means-ends support sequences in action and perception. Infancy, 8(2), 119-145.
• Woodward, A.L. (2004). Infants’ use of action knowledge to get a grasp on words. In D.G. Hall and S.R. Waxman (eds.), Weaving a Lexicon. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 149-172.
• Woodward, A.L. (2005). The infant origins of intentional understanding. Advances in Child Development and Behavior, 33 229-62.

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Posters

• Cannon, E. N., & Woodward, A. L. (2008). Why is her hand doing that? 9-month-olds use of action-effects to infer a goal.
• Durham, M., Cannon, E. N., & Woodward, A.L. (2008). Can Infants resist a mouse in a house? Another look at infants' abilities to copy action goals.
• Gerson, S., Leventon, J., Vaish, A., & Woodward, A.L. (2008). Infants' Understanding of Emotional Expressions: Using Information for Oneself and to Predict Actions of Others.
• Gerson, S. & Woodward, A.L. (2008). The effects of Active vs. Passive Experience on Infants' Action Understanding.
• Mahajan, N., Woodward, A. L., Eisenband, L. R., & Sommerville, J. A. (2008). Perception and Production of Means-End Goal Structures in Eight-Month Old Infants.
• Mahajan, N., Woodward, A. L., & Ridgeway, L. E. (2008). Seven-Month-Old Infants Imitate Animate But Not Inanimate Agents.

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