Together, the current experiments provide evidence that 12-month-olds perceive an object transfer
action between two social agents that includes a give-me gesture as a more well-formed goal-directed
action than when the same action is completed with an inverted hand shape. This set of experiments
extends prior research, which has shown that properties of physical goals affect latencies of infants’
goal-directed gaze shifts during action observation (e.g., Gredebäck et al., 2009; Henrichs et al.,
2012). The current study suggests that 1-year-olds are sensitive to the properties of social action goals
(e.g., of a give-me gesture) and that these social properties influence infants’ goal-directed gaze shifts
during observation of a give-and-take interaction. These conclusions are discussed more extensively
below.