In addition, it is important to acknowledge that the current set of studies cannot completely disentangle
whether infants perceived the presented object transfer event as an action or as a segment of a
social interaction. One possibility is that infants were faster in exhibiting online goal-directed gaze
shifts to a palm-up hand without necessarily encoding the give-me gesture as an integral part of
the observed social interaction. Another richer interpretation of infants’ gaze behavior would suggest
that infants are sensitive to the communicative information of the give-me gesture (i.e., the conveyed
request), the compliant reaction to pass the object to the recipient’s hand forming the give-me gesture,
and the give-me gesture as an appropriate gesture to receive the object. However, the current data do
not permit inferences about how much infants’ goal-directed gaze shifts were based on encoding the
social context of the give-and-take interaction such as that the passing hand provides some benefit for
the receiving hand. One possibility to test this hypothesis in future research would be to disambiguate
a social goal from a social action, for example, to present the give-me gesture in a non-social context
where it does not convey any social information. For instance, comparing latencies of goal-directed
gaze shifts to a palm-up versus palm-down hand receiving an object that was moving down a slide
(non-social context) would allow testing whether infants in the current study encoded the social nature
of the give-me gesture as an integral part of the interaction.