Encoding interactive scripts at 10 months of age

Understanding action–reaction associations that give origin to interactive scripts (e.g., give-and-take interactions) is essential for appreciating social exchanges. However, studies on infants’ action understanding have mainly investigated the case of actions performed by individual agents. Moreover, although extensive literature has explored infants’ comprehension of action–effect relationships in object functioning, no study has addressed whether it also plays a role when observing social interactions, an issue we addressed here. In a first study, 10-month-old infants observed short videos of dyadic exchanges. We investigated whether they were able to link specific human gestures directed toward another person to specific vocal reactions in the receiver. We used a double-habituation paradigm in which infants were sequentially habituated to two specific action–reaction associations. In the test phase, infants watched one of the two habituated (Familiar) videos, a video with a reversed action–reaction association (Violation), and a Novel video. Results showed that the infants looked longer at both the Novel and Violation test trials than at the Familiar test trials. In a control study, we show that these results could not be accounted for by associative learning; indeed, learning of the action–reaction association did not occur when the vocalization was not produced by the receiver but only contingent on the agent's action. Thus, we show that 10-month-old infants can encode specific social action–effect relationships during the observation of dyadic interactions and that the interactivity of the social context may be critical to shaping young infants’ understanding of others’ behaviors.