Assessing Young Children's Hierarchical Action Segmentation

Recognizing where action units begin and end is an earlydeveloping skill that supports inferences about goals motivating others' action. One notable feature of goal-directed action is that segments are organized hierarchically. That is, action is interpreted as structured with respect to the goals and sub-goals of an actor, which can be recognized as corresponding to coarserand finer-grained action units respectively. We report on the success of adapting a nonverbal paradigm to index hierarchical action segmentation in a developmental population. Results indicated that 3and 4-year-old children, similar to adults in past studies, responded to segment boundaries with surges in attention that varied according to event granularity (e.g., finevs. coarsegrained). This effect was seen most strongly in children displaying superior memory for the events.