The development of the prediction of complex actions in early childhood

ABSTRACT

Much of our everyday actions consist of several action steps, which are hierarchically structured. Yet, little is known about the development of the prediction of such complex actions in early childhood. The current work investigated the development of predicting means-end actions in 3- to 6-year-olds (N = 86) and an adult control group (N = 25). Participants were asked to predict the upcoming action of an actor who either needed an object (means) to achieve her goal (complex condition) or could directly achieve her goal (simple condition). Overall, children performed above chance in predicting the upcoming action of complex actions. Furthermore, simple action prediction and complex action prediction increased with age. However, overall, their performance was significantly worse for predicting complex compared to simple actions. Adults on the other hand showed ceiling performance in both conditions. Taken together, the results show that children’s prediction performance of complex actions increases during early childhood. These findings expand previous research on complex action understanding to the prediction of complex actions and show substantial development during the preschool years.

KEYWORDS:

• Complex action
• action prediction
• pre-schoolers
• means-end
• early childhood

Acknowledgments

We thank the parents and children for participating in our study as well as our babylab team and students for helping with the data acquisition. We further thank the reviewers for their valuable and insightful comments and suggestions. Moreover, we would like to thank Anne Scheel for providing stimuli material and Kerstin Ganglmayer and Yvonne Tobias-Miersch for proofreading the manuscript.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in the Open Science Framework (OSF) at https://osf.io/75bcf/.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the German Research Foundation [DFG, FOR 2253, PA 2302/7-1, 2].