Evidence for a unitary goal concept in 12-month-old infants.

We investigated whether infants can transfer their goal attribution between situations that contain different types of information about the goal. We found that 12-month-olds who had attributed a goal based on the causal efficacy of a means-end action generated expectations about the actor's action in another scenario in which the actor could choose between alternative outcomes. This finding suggests that, by 12 months, infants possess a unitary concept of goal.