Seven-Month-Old Infants Selectively Reproduce the Goals of Animate But Not Inanimate Agents.

We tested 7-month-old infants' sensitivity to others' goals in an imitation task, and assessed whether infants are as likely to imitate the goals of nonhuman agents as they are to imitate human goals. In the current studies, we used the paradigm developed by Hamlin et. al (in press) to test infants' responses to human actions versus closely matched inanimate object motions. The experimental events resembled those from Luo and Baillargeon's (2005) looking-time study in which infants responded to the movements of an inanimate object (a self-propelled box) as goal-directed. Although infants responded visually to the goal structure of the object's movement, here they did not reproduce the box's goal. These results provide further evidence that 7-month-olds' goal representations are sufficiently robust to drive their own manual actions. However, they indicate that infants' responses to inanimate object movements may not be robust in this way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]