Infants’ Understanding of the Imperative Function of Communicative Actions

We showed animated videos to 12-13-month-olds in four experiments (N=20 each) to test their expectations about the imperative use of communicative signals in third-party social interactions. Our findings suggest that infants expect agents (but not objects) to react to communicative (as opposed to non-communicative) signals by producing non-communicative intentional behavior.