AbstractInfants represent the acts of others and their own acts in commensurate terms. They can recognize cross‐modal equivalences between acts they see others perform and their own felt bodily movements. This recognition of self–other equivalences in action gives rise to interpreting others as having similar psychological states such as perceptions and emotions. The 'like me' nature of others is the starting point for social cognition, not its culmination.
AbstractWe examined the ontogeny of gaze following by testing infants at 9, 10 and 11 months of age. Infants (N = 96) watched as an adult turned her head toward a target with either open or closed eyes. The 10‐ and 11‐month‐olds followed adult turns significantly more often in the open‐eyes than the closed‐eyes condition, but the 9‐month‐olds did not respond differentially. Although 9‐month‐olds may view others as 'body orienters', older infants begin to register whether others are 'visually connected' to the external world and, hence, understand adult looking in a new way. Results also showed a strong positive correlation between gaze‐following behavior at 10–11 months and subsequent language scores at 18 months. Implications for social cognition are discussed in light of the developmental shift in gaze following between 9 and 11 months of age.
AbstractChildren show signs of intergroup biases from early in development, and evidence suggests that these biases increase through middle childhood. Here we critically review and synthesize the literature on the different types of childhood experiences that have been associated with increases or decreases in childhood intergroup bias. Based on the review, one type of childhood experience stands out as being reliably associated with increased intergroup bias over multiple studies—specific overt messages communicating intergroup conflict with, or negativity from, other groups. Three types of childhood experiences were found to be reliably associated with reduced intergroup bias: (a) structured intergroup contact, (b) explicit education about prejudice, and (c) imagined contact with members of other groups. We highlight the social and policy implications of this work and delineate specific experiences and interventions that might be helpful in ameliorating childhood intergroup biases. We also highlight developmental issues concerning the ways that interventions need to vary to be maximally effective at different ages. Finally, recommendations are offered on key factors to incorporate in childhood intergroup bias interventions, as well as what to avoid when attempting to design such programs due to negative (unintended) consequences. This review attempts to integrate state‐of‐the‐art findings from developmental psychology with principles and theories in social psychology that derive from work with adults.
Abstract Advanced inhibitory control skills have been found in bilingual speakers as compared to monolingual controls (
Bialystok, 1999
). We examined whether this effect is generalized to an unstudied language group (Spanish‐English bilingual) and multiple measures of executive function by administering a battery of tasks to 50 kindergarten children drawn from three language groups: native bilinguals, monolinguals (English), and English speakers enrolled in second‐language immersion kindergarten. Despite having significantly lower verbal scores and parent education/income level, Spanish‐English bilingual children's raw scores did not differ from their peers. After statistically controlling for these factors and age, native bilingual children performed significantly better on the executive function battery than both other groups. Importantly, the relative advantage was significant for tasks that appear to call for managing conflicting attentional demands (Conflict tasks); there was no advantage on impulse‐control (Delay tasks). These results advance our understanding of both the generalizability and specificity of the compensatory effects of bilingual experience for children's cognitive development.
Long‐term recall memory, as indexed by deferred imitation, was assessed in 12‐month‐old infants. Independent groups of infants were tested after retention intervals of 3 min, 1 week and 4 weeks. Deferred imitation was assessed using the 'observation‐only' procedure in which infants were not allowed motor practice on the tasks before the delay was imposed. Thus, the memory could not have been based on re‐accessing a motor habit, because none was formed in the first place. After the delay, memory was assessed either in the same or a different environmental context from the one in which the adult had originally demonstrated the acts. In Experiments 1 and 3, infants observed the target acts while in an unusual environment (an orange and white polka‐dot tent), and recall memory was tested in an ordinary room. In Experiment 2, infants observed the target acts in their homes and were tested for memory in a university room. The results showed recall memory after all retention intervals, including the 4 week delay, with no effect of context change. Interestingly, the forgetting function showed that the bulk of the forgetting occurred during the first week. The findings of recall memory without motor practice support the view that infants as young as 12 months old use a declarative (nonprocedural) memory system to span delay intervals as long as 4 weeks.
AbstractHow do young children learn about causal structure in an uncertain and variable world? We tested whether they can use observed probabilistic information to solve causal learning problems. In two experiments, 24‐month‐olds observed an adult produce a probabilistic pattern of causal evidence. The toddlers then were given an opportunity to design their own intervention. In Experiment 1, toddlers saw one object bring about an effect with a higher probability than a second object. In Experiment 2, the frequency of the effect was held constant, though its probability differed. After observing the probabilistic evidence, toddlers in both experiments chose to act on the object that was more likely to produce the effect. The results demonstrate that toddlers can learn about cause and effect without trial‐and‐error or linguistic instruction on the task, simply by observing the probabilistic patterns of evidence resulting from the imperfect actions of other social agents. Suchobservational causal learningfrom probabilistic displays supports human children's rapid cultural learning.
We used imitation as a tool for investigating how young children code action. The study was designed to examine the errors children make in re‐enacting manual gestures they see. Thirty‐two 3‐year‐old children served as subjects. Each child was shown 24 gestures, generated by systematically crossing four factors: visual monitoring, spatial endpoint, movement path, and number of hands. The results showed no difference as a function of whether the children could visually monitor their own responses. Interestingly, children made significantly more errors when the adult's action terminated on a body part than they did when the same movement terminated near the body part. There were also significantly more errors when the demonstrated act involved crossing midline than when it did not, and more errors when it involved one hand rather than two hands. Our hypothesis is that human acts are coded in terms of goals. The goals are hierarchically organized, and because young children have difficulty simultaneously integrating multiple goals into one act they often re‐enact the goals that are ranked higher, which leads to the errors observed. We argue that imitation is an active reconstruction of perceived events and taps cognitive processing. We suggest that the goal‐based imitation in 3‐year‐olds is a natural developmental outgrowth of the perceptual–motor mapping and goal‐directed coding of human acts found in infancy.
AbstractGaze following plays a role in parent–infant communication and is a key mechanism by which infants acquire information about the world from social input. Gaze following in Deaf infants has been understudied. Twelve Deaf infants of Deaf parents (DoD) who had native exposure to American Sign Language (ASL) were gender‐matched and age‐matched (±7 days) to 60 spoken‐language hearing control infants. Results showed that the DoD infants had significantly higher gaze‐following scores than the hearing infants. We hypothesize that in the absence of auditory input, and with support from ASL‐fluent Deaf parents, infants become attuned to visual‐communicative signals from other people, which engenders increased gaze following. These findings underscore the need to revise the 'deficit model' of deafness. Deaf infants immersed in natural sign language from birth are better at understanding the signals and identifying the referential meaning of adults' gaze behavior compared to hearing infants not exposed to sign language. Broader implications for theories of social‐cognitive development are discussed. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at https://youtu.be/QXCDK_CUmAI
AbstractThere is increasing interest in neurobiological methods for investigating the shared representation of action perception and production in early development. We explored the extent and regional specificity of EEG desynchronization in the infant alpha frequency range (6–9 Hz) during action observation and execution in 14‐month‐old infants. Desynchronization during execution was restricted to central electrode sites, while action observation was associated with a broader desynchronization across frontal, central, and parietal regions. The finding of regional specificity in the overlap between EEG responses to action execution and observation suggests that the rhythm seen in the 6–9 Hz range over central sites in infancy shares certain properties with the adult mu rhythm. The magnitude of EEG desynchronization to action perception and production appears to be smaller for infants than for adults and older children, suggesting developmental change in this measure.
Abstract We measured infants' recognition of familiar and unfamiliar 3‐D objects and their 2‐D representations using event‐related potentials (ERPs). Infants differentiated familiar from unfamiliar objects when viewing them in both two and three dimensions. However, differentiation between the familiar and novel objects occurred more quickly when infants viewed the object in 3‐D than when they viewed 2‐D representations. The results are discussed with respect to infants' recognition abilities and their understanding of real objects and representations. This is the first study using 3‐D objects in conjunction with ERPs in infants, and it introduces an interesting new methodology for assessing infants' electrophysiological responses to real objects.
AbstractThe organization of body representations in the adult brain has been well documented. Little is understood about this aspect of brain organization in human infancy. The current study employed electroencephalography (EEG) with 60‐day‐old infants to test the distribution of brain responses to tactile stimulation of three different body parts: hand, foot, and lip. Analyses focused on a prominent positive response occurring at 150–200 ms in the somatosensory evoked potential at central and parietal electrode sites. The results show differential electrophysiological signatures for touch of these three body parts. Stimulation of the left hand was associated with greater positive amplitude over the lateral central region contralateral to the side stimulated. Left foot stimulation was associated with greater positivity over the midline parietal site. Stimulation of the midline of the upper lip was associated with a strong bilateral response over the central region. These findings provide new insights into the neural representation of the body in infancy and shed light on research and theories about the involvement of somatosensory cortex in infant imitation and social perception.
Abstract We introduce computer‐based methodologies for investigating object identification in 3‐ to 5‐year‐old children. In two experiments, preschool children and adults indicated when they could identify degraded pictures of common objects as those pictures either gradually improved or degraded in clarity. Clarity transformations were implemented in four ways: blurring, decreasing the picture's physical size, decreasing the pixel signal‐to‐noise ratio, and cropping. In Experiment 1, all age groups correctly identified objects at a more degraded state when those objects began moderately, as opposed to very, degraded and then clarified. This finding supports the notion that previous perceptual hypotheses interfere with object identification (i.e. the perceptual interference effect). In Experiment 2, children, but not adults, overestimated their ability to recognize objects in a degraded state when the object's identity was given to them beforehand. This suggests that for young children knowledge of the object's true identity cannot be ignored when evaluating their current perceptions. This is the first demonstration of the perceptual interference effect in children. We discuss both methodological and theoretical implications of the findings for research on object perception and theory of mind.
AbstractTheory of mind requires belief‐anddesire‐understanding. Event‐related brain potential (ERP) research on belief‐ and desire‐reasoning in adults found mid‐frontal activations for both desires and beliefs, and selective right‐posterior activationsonlyfor beliefs. Developmentally, children understand desires before beliefs; thus, a critical question concerns whether neural specialization for belief‐reasoning exists in childhood or develops later. Neural activity was recorded as 7‐ and 8‐year‐olds (N = 18) performed the same diverse‐desires, diverse‐beliefs, and physical control tasks used in a previous adult ERP study. Like adults, mid‐frontal scalp activations were found for belief‐anddesire‐reasoning. Moreover, analyses usingcorrecttrials alone yielded selective right‐posterior activations for belief‐reasoning. Results suggest developmental links between increasingly accurate understanding of complex mental states and neural specialization supporting this understanding.
