Do infants distinguish between events based on the number of participants involved, even before they learn words to describe those events, or are their responses driven by the physical properties of the visual scene?

In this study, we’re interested in how children see events in the world around them at very young ages, before they’ve started learning words that describe those events. In a previous study, we asked if 9-to-12-month-olds view a scene in which a girl takes a truck from a boy as involving three core participants: the girl, the truck, and the boy. We first show them a video of a girl picking up a toy truck, with a boy sitting nearby but not participating in the event. When children become familiar with the event, their attention drops. Then, we measure whether their attention is recaptured by making a slight change in the video: either the girl starts taking the truck from the boy, or the girl picks up the truck in a different way, by sliding it across the table. We found that children are more surprised by the “taking” change than by the “sliding” change, which suggests that they consider the boy a participant in the “taking” event when he wasn’t a participant in the “picking up” event.  

In this current study, we’re showing kids the same design with all of the videos upside-down. This makes it really hard to see these scenes as coherent events. Kids are more likely to react in differences to the physical properties of the videos, like brightness or how things are moving across the screen. So, if we don’t see that children show different responses to the “taking” and “sliding” videos when they’re shown upside-down, we can be more confident that these videos have similar physical properties, and that their behavior in the earlier study was because they were seeing the events as having different numbers of participants when they were played right-side-up.