Early Development of Action Control

How infants come to perceive and produce actions has moved toward the center of developmental psychology over the past several years. Two strands run through this work: what children grasp about the movements and goals of other people, and what happens as they begin to carry out purposeful actions of their own.

This paper pulls those strands together. It reviews what is known about young children's early reading of actions performed by others, alongside what is known about the actions children themselves start to perform, and it sets out a theoretical account of how action control emerges in the first years of life.

At the heart of the discussion sits a question about direction. The older view holds that a child first makes sense of her own actions and only later extends that understanding to the people around her. An alternative possibility runs the other way: that comprehension of what others do comes first, and self-understanding follows. Which account better fits the evidence on perception-action coupling is the problem the paper takes up.

Gisa Aschersleben, Developmental Psychology Unit, Department of Psychology, Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany.