Infant action understanding in the first year of life

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Understanding and interpreting the actions and minds of other people is one of the most challenging tasks for infants and young children in their development. To reason about other’s actions in terms of goals forms an important cornerstone in infants’ action understanding. Understanding actions as goal-directed enables the interpretation, prediction and the making of further sense of other people’s actions and behaviour. This ability to detect that an action is directed toward a goal has been theorised to be among the first elements present in infants’ reasoning about people’s behaviour, preceding an understanding of intentions and other mental states (Dennett, 1987; Premack, 1990; Wellman, 1992). However, to become a functional member of our world and achieve an adult-like understanding of others’ actions and minds, infants have a long way to go.