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.

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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

• Needham, A. & Woodward, A. L. (2009). Introduction. In A. Woodward & A. Needham (Eds.) Learning and the infant mind (pp xii-xxvii). Oxford University Press.
• Woodward, A. L. (2009). Infants’ grasp of others’ intentions. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 18, 53-57.
• Henderson, A.M.E., Gerson, S., & Woodward, A.L. (2008). The birth of social intelligence. Zero to Three, May, 13-20.
• Woodward, A. L., Sommerville, J.A., Gerson, S., Henderson, A. M. E., & Buresh, J. S. (2009). The emergence of intention attribution in infancy. In B. Ross (Ed.) The Psychology of Learning and Motivation, Volume 51. Academic Press.
• For a complete list of publications, please visit Dr. Amanda Woodward's Publications Page.
  

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Posters

• Cannon, E.N., Schlebecker, K., & Woodward, A.L. (2009). Does Object Appearance Influence 18-Month-Olds' Goal Imitation?
• Cannon. E.N., Turek, C., & Woodward, A.L. (2009). Action Anticipation Relates to Action Production in 12-Month-Olds
• Gerson, S., Shuck, L.H., & Woodward, A.L. (2009). Finding the Goals that Structure Events.
• Gerson, S., Eisenband, L., & Woodward, A.L. (2009). What Can 8-Month-Olds Pull Out of Means-End Training, Gerneralization of Training Effects on Understanding of Actions in Others
• Gerson, S. & Woodward, A.L. (2009). Early Intention Understanding, The Role of Self-Produced Experience and Its Effect on Object Generalization
• 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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