Infants use contextual contingency to guide their interpretation of others’ goal-directed behavior

To examine the extent to which infants encode the context of a goal-directed action, nine-month-old infants were tested in three separate experiments using a visual habituation paradigm similar to that used by Woodward (1998). Experiment 1, necessary to support methodology used in subsequent experiments, demonstrated that infants can track the goals of others in a visual habituation paradigm even when a goal object changes position. Experiment …