Selective action prediction in infancy depending on linguistic cues: an EEG and Eyetracker study
Humans’ capacity to predict actions and to socially categorize individuals are at the basis of social cognition. Such capacities emerge in early infancy. By 6 months of age infants predict others’ reaching actions considering others’ epistemic state. At a similar age, infants are biased to attend to and interact with more familiar individuals, considering adult-like social categories such as the language people speak. We report that these two core processes are interrelated early on in infancy. In a belief-based action prediction task, 6-month-old infants (males and females) presented with a native speaker generated online predictions about the agent’s actions, as revealed by the activation of participants’ sensorimotor areas before the agent’s movement. However, infants who were presented with a foreign speaker did not recruit their motor system before the agent’s action. Eye-tracker analysis provided further evidence that linguistic group familiarity influences how infants predict ot