Neural correlates of action perception

Studying the perception and understanding of actions in toddlers relies largely on implicit measures. Here, we used a preferential looking paradigm to investigate whether 2-year-old toddlers automatically consider hesitant hand movements a less reliable sources of information than confident hand movements and if this behavior is associated with their capacity to process motor actions and/or false believes. We gathered some evidence that toddlers process hesitant hand movements as unreliable for a subset of stimuli. The spatial distance between hand and target object may play an important role in the processing of hand movements in toddlers. While there was no significant association between hesitation processing and other forms of motor processing (weight-estimation, grasp processing) or theory of mind (false belief) skills in toddlers, an adult control group showed a positive correlation between hesitation and motor processing, which may indicate that both skills are based on motor simulation. A longitudinal study would be the ideal tool to investigate at which age this association manifests in children.