Together, prior literature provides support to the existence of a link between infants’ own action
proficiency and action understanding as measured with latencies of goal-directed gaze shifts (e.g.,
Given that infants begin to produce and respond to give-me gestures during interactions with others from around
9 to 12 months of age it is possible that infants will also demonstrate sensitivity to
observed social interactions, including give-me gestures, at 12 months of age. In addition, recent studies
have demonstrated that latencies of goal-directed gaze shifts are modulated by properties of the
goal. This would suggest that latencies of goal-directed gaze shifts might also be influenced by properties of a social goal such as the receiving hand in a give-and-take interaction. However, information about how infants perceive
give-me gestures as goals of observed social actions is limited. This limitation is notable in both anticipation
studies and studies of early gestural communication, which focused primarily on pointing
or on infants’ production of give-me gestures The current study addressed this gap within the developmental literature by investigating whether the social properties of a give-me gesture as a goal of an observed give-and-take interaction affect
online gaze behavior in 12-month-old infants. In the following article, we first present an experiment
testing differences in latency of goal-directed gaze shifts toward a receiving hand that forms either a
meaningful and functional gesture (the give-me gesture) or a non-functional hand shape (the inverted
hand shape). Finding faster gaze shifts to the give-me gesture as the receiving hand would be consistent
with the hypothesis that infants are sensitive to the social properties of the gesture as a part of the
give-and-take interaction. Three subsequent experiments are presented to rule out alternative explanations
of gaze shift differences, such as affordance- and attention-based explanations