The developing cognitive substrate of sequential action control in 9- to 12-month-olds: Evidence for concurrent activation models

Abstract

Infants interpret third-person sequential actions as goal directed by 6 months of age, around 9 months of age they start to perform sequential actions to accomplish higher order goals. The present study employed an innovative pupillometric and oculomotor paradigm to study how infants represent first-person sequential actions. We aimed to contrast chaining-, concurrent- and integrated models of sequential-action representation. 9- and 12- month olds were taught action sequences consisting of two elementary actions. Thereafter the secondary action was selectively activated to assess any interactions with the primary action. Results suggest that concurrent models best capture the representations formed