Advances in understanding the perception-production link: Evidence from infant eye, brain, and motor behavior

Abstract

Empirical work has sparked notable progress in our understanding of how infants perceive and encode other people’s actions, goals, and intentions. The role that infant action experience may play in this process – the perception-production link – has been a significant focus. Here, we analyze and unite three lines of work on this topic that have emerged over the last 25 years. First, looking-time measures have been used to assess whether infants’ processing of others’ goals is correlated with their own competence at performing similar actions. Second, studies have been designed to compare infants with different motor abilities and to intervene to alter infants’ production experience, in order to test the effects of this experience on infants’ subsequent perception of actions. Third, cognitive neuroscience techniques have been used to probe the neural correlates of infants’ perception and production of actions by measuring the sensorimotor mu rhythm. We conclude with a look toward the future, including the value of investigating whether and how experience gained through action production contributes to and enriches action perception, and the promise of new infant brain-imaging techniques for addressing these enduring questions.