Into the Minds of Babies

Baldwin wondered if infants, even younger than one year of age, might have the capacity to identify structure within complex activity. Would infants recognize the "units of action" in the behavior of the person they are observing? Would the infants recognize these units even when the units are not demarcated, in any simple way, by pauses in the flow of behavior? "For example," she says, "many of our behaviors fall into a similar pattern: we fix our gaze on an object, touch it or otherwise manipulate it, release it, and move our gaze and body-orientation elsewhere, then repeat the process with another object. If infants can identify each goal-directed action as a discrete unit, they would have a leg up on discovering the intentions motivating such activities."

By running a series of experiments with infants, Baldwin and colleagues collected evidence that infants indeed segment continuously flowing behavior into units that coincide with the initiation and completion of intention. The scientists used a series of videotapes of adults performing simple actions, such as grasping a towel. Sometimes, the tapes were freeze-framed at the completion of the action; other times, the tapes were freeze-framed in the middle. The infants showed only moderate interest in the tapes that showed the complete action. But they were transfixed by tapes that interrupted the expected sequence in mid-stream. That, says Baldwin, appears to be "the first evidence out there that infants this young are sensitive to the structure inherent in intentional action."

Taken as a whole, Baldwin's research contributes significantly to our understanding of how social cognition, language, and knowledge acquisition are linked in the developing brain.

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