Learning how actions function: the role of outcomes in infants' representation of events

Action is a fundamental component of object representations. However, little is known about how infants represent actions performed on objects. Across four experiments, we tested the hypothesis that at 10 months of age (N = 80) infants represent the general ability of actions to produce outcomes (sounds). Experiments 1A and 1B showed that infants encode actions and associate actions and object appearances in events in which actions produced no sound outcomes. Experiment 2 showed that infants associate the presence or absence of outcomes with actions. Experiment 3 showed, in contrast, that infants did not associate the presence or absence of outcomes with object appearances. Together, these studies suggest that infants encode the outcome potential of specific actions. We discuss the implications of these findings for our understanding of the development of action representations.