General discussion
This research investigated infants’ online perception of give-me gestures during observation of a
give-and-take interaction between two individuals. Experiment 1 demonstrated that 12-month-olds’
gaze shifts from a passing hand to a receiving hand are significantly faster when the receiving hand
forms a give-me gesture relative to when the goal is presented as an inverted hand shape. Experiment
2 showed that affordances between the two receiving hands cannot account for the difference in gaze
latencies observed in Experiment 1. Two additional control experiments demonstrated that differences
in infants’ predictive gaze behavior were not mediated by a general attentional preference for
the give-me gesture in the absence of the social action of receiving.