The understanding of own and others’ actions during infancy

Abstract

Developmental psychologists assume that infants understand other persons’ actions after and because they understand their own (“Like-me” perspective). However, there is another possibility as well, namely that infants come to understand their own actions after and because they understand other persons’ actions (“Like-you” perspective). We reviewed infant research on the influence of perceived actions on self-performed actions as well as the reverse. Furthermore, we investigated the interplay between both aspects of action understanding by means of a sequence variation. The results show the impact of agentive experience for action understanding, but not the reverse. The question whether infants’ perceived and to-be-produced actions share common representations of the perceptual and the motor system is discussed in relation to its implications for the social making of minds.