  In a control condition, the hand was replaced with a rod that had a multi-fingered sponge at the end. When the rod/sponge followed its old path and touched the new object, babies did not dishabituate; they dishabituated only when the rod/sponge followed a new path to the old object. The suggestion is that the babies did not see the action of the rod/sponge (whose shape was similar to the shape of the hand) as a goal-directed action. What is it about the presence of the human arm that signals a goal? Would any movement involving repeated contact between a human hand and one of the toys trigger goal attribution? Woodward (1999) shows that this is not the case. In this study, a human arm was used again, but this time the arm merely dropped onto the display, and contact was between the back of the hand and the toy. In this case, there was contact, but not grasping. In this condition, adults would be less likely to interpret the action as purposeful, and the same was true of the babies. When the hand/arm followed its earlier path (touching the new object), babies did not dishabituate; they did however dishabituate when it followed the new path, even though it made contact with the same object as before. This suggests that 5-month old babies, like adults, attribute goal-directedness (again: ‘in some sense’) to human arms and hands that reach and grasp, but not to arms that only drop and make passive contact with the object.