Marlene MeyerRadboud University | RU
Marlene Meyer
PhD (Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience)
About
59
Publications
6,477
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
791
Citations
Publications
Publications (59)
Curiosity-driven exploration involves actively engaging with the environment to learn from it. Here, we hypothesize that the cognitive mechanisms underlying exploratory behavior may differ across individuals depending on personal characteristics such as autistic traits. In turn, this variability might influence successful exploration. To investigat...
Do toddlers and adults engage in spontaneous Theory of Mind (ToM)? Evidence from anticipatory looking (AL) studies suggests they do. But a growing body of failed replication studies raised questions about the paradigm’s suitability, urging the need to test the robustness of AL as a spontaneous measure of ToM. In a multi-lab collaboration we examine...
Humans are driven by an intrinsic motivation to learn, but the developmental origins of curiosity‐driven exploration remain unclear. We investigated the computational principles guiding 4‐year‐old children's exploration during a touchscreen game ( N = 102, F = 49, M = 53, primarily white and middle‐class, data collected in the Netherlands from 2021...
Recent research has shown that infants are curious and actively seek out situations from which they can learn. When presented with different stimulus sequences on a computer screen, babies tend to allocate their attention to stimuli that offer opportunities for information gain. Interestingly, however, the degree to which attention is guided by inf...
Surface facial electromyography (EMG) is commonly used to detect emotions from subtle facial expressions. Although there are established procedures for collecting EMG data and some aspects of their processing, there is little agreement among researchers about the optimal way to process the EMG signal, so that the study-unrelated variability (noise)...
Humans face the challenge of making sense of a complex world. Learning where to find information is crucial to filter through the abundance of stimuli, distinguish relevant from irrelevant sources, and optimize our learning. Here, we examined the developmental roots of information-seeking by testing whether 8-month-old infants can predict where to...
Humans face the challenge of making sense of a complex world. Learning where to find information is crucial to filter through the abundance of stimuli, distinguish relevant from irrelevant sources, and optimize our learning. Here, we examined the developmental roots of information-seeking by testing whether 8-month-old infants can predict where to...
Exploration involves actively engaging with the environment to acquire new knowledge. Here, we hypothesize that the cognitive mechanisms underlying exploratory behavior may differ across individuals depending on personal characteristics such as autistic traits. In turn, this variability might impact successful exploration. To investigate this, we c...
Humans face the challenge of making sense of a complex world. Learning where to find information is crucial to filter through the abundance of stimuli, distinguish relevant from irrelevant sources, and optimize our learning. Here, we examined the developmental roots of information-seeking by testing whether 8-month-old infants can predict where to...
Surface facial electromyography (EMG) is a promising approach to detect emotions from subtle facial expressions. However, there is little agreement among researchers about the optimal way to process the EMG signal, so that the study-unrelated variability (noise) is removed, and the emotion-related variability is best detected. The aim of the curren...
Predicting actions is a fundamental ability that helps us to comprehend what is happening in our environment and to interact with others. The motor system was previously identified as source of action predictions. Yet, which aspect of the statistical likelihood of upcoming actions the motor system is sensitive to remains an open question. This EEG...
Despite substantial evidence indicating a close link between action production and perception in early child development, less is known about how action experience shapes the processes of perceiving and anticipating others’ actions. Here, we developed a novel approach to capture functional connectivity specific to certain brain areas to investigate...
Background
Behavioral studies have shown that individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have problems coordinating their own motor actions (meta-analysis: Fournier et al., 2010). There is also evidence that delays and atypical patterns of development emerge early in the onset of ASD (Iverson et al., 2019). One hypothesis is that motor impairm...
Behavioral evidence shows that experience with an action shapes action perception. Neural mirroring has been suggested as a mechanism underlying this behavioral phenomenon. Suppression of electroencephalogram (EEG) power in the mu frequency band, an index of motor activation, typically reflects neural mirroring. However, contradictory findings exis...
Exploration is curiosity-driven when it relies on the intrinsic motivation to know rather than on extrinsic rewards. Recent evidence shows that artificial agents perform better on a variety of tasks when their learning is curiosity-driven, and humans often engage in curiosity-driven learning when sampling information from the environment. However,...
Buckner and Carroll [Trends in Cognitive Sciences (2007), Vol. 11, pp. 49-57] argued that episodic memory (EM), episodic future thinking (EFT), theory of mind (ToM), and spatial navigation all build on the same mental mechanism-self-projection, that is, the ability to disengage from the immediate present and shift perspective to alternative tempora...
What do you think your friends are thinking when they get a compliment? How do they feel when they get a good grade at school? Thinking about other people and what they know, believe, or want is called social cognition. Certain parts of the brain are important for social cognition, and those parts work together in a network to allow us to think abo...
When teaching infants new actions, parents tend to modify their movements. Infants prefer these infant‐directed actions (IDAs) over adult‐directed actions and learn well from them. Yet, it remains unclear how parents’ action modulations capture infants’ attention. Typically, making movements larger than usual is thought to draw attention. Recent fi...
Predicting actions is a fundamental ability that helps us to comprehend what is happening in our environment and to interact with others. The motor system was previously identified as source of action predictions. Yet, which aspect of the statistical likelihood of upcoming actions the motor system is sensitive to remains an open question. This EEG...
Behavioral evidence shows that experience with an action shapes action perception. Neural mirroring has been suggested as a mechanism underlying this behavioral phenomenon. Suppression of EEG power in the mu frequency band, an index of motor activation, typically reflects neural mirroring. However, contradictory findings exist regarding the associa...
From infancy, neural processes for perceiving others’ actions and producing one’s own actions overlap (neural mirroring). Adults and children show enhanced mirroring in social interactions. Yet, whether social context affects mirroring in infancy, a time when processing others’ actions is crucial for action learning, remains unclear. We examined wh...
Developmental research using electroencephalography (EEG) offers valuable insights in brain processes early in life, but at the same time, applying this sensitive technique to young children who are often non-compliant and have short attention spans comes with practical limitations. It is thus of particular importance to optimally use the limited r...
When teaching infants new actions, parents tend to modify their movements. Infants prefer these infant-directed actions (IDAs) over adult-directed actions and learn well from them. Yet, it remains unclear how parents’ action modulations capture infants’ attention. Typically, making movements larger than usual is thought to draw attention. Recent fi...
Predicting others’ actions is an essential part of acting in the social world. Action kinematics have been proposed to be a cue about others’ intentions. It is still an open question as to whether adults can use kinematic information in naturalistic settings when presented as a part of a richer visual scene than previously examined. We investigated...
Understanding others’ perspectives and integrating this knowledge in social interactions is challenging for young children; even adults struggle with this skill. While young children show the capacity to understand what others can and cannot see under supportive laboratory conditions, more research is necessary to understand how children implement...
Did I make that sound? Differentiating whether sensory events are caused by us or the environment is pivotal for our sense of agency. Adults can predict the sensory effects of their actions, which results in attenuated processing of self-produced events compared with externally generated events. Yet, little is known about whether young infants pred...
Do children and adults engage in spontaneous Theory of Mind (ToM)? Accumulating evidence from anticipatory looking (AL) studies suggests that they do. But a growing body of studies failed to replicate these original findings. This paper presents the first step of a large-scale multi-lab collaboration dedicated to testing the robustness of spontaneo...
Early in life, greater exposure to diverse people can change the tendency to prefer one’s own social group. For instance, infants from racially diverse environments show less preference for their own-race (ingroup) over other-race (outgroup) faces than infants from racially homogeneous environments. Yet how social environment changes ingroup versus...
Early in life, greater exposure to diverse people can change the tendency to prefer one’s own social group. For instance, infants from racially diverse environments show less preference for their own‐race (ingroup) over other‐race (outgroup) faces than infants from racially homogeneous environments. Yet how social environment changes ingroup versus...
From early in life, we activate our neural motor system when observing others’ actions. In adults, this so-called mirroring is modulated not only by the saliency of an action but also by top-down processes, like the intention to imitate it. Yet, it remains unknown whether neural processing of others’ actions can be modulated by top-down processes i...
Children learn actions performed by a social partner better when they misremember these actions as their own. Identifying the factors that alter the propensity to make appropriation errors is critical for optimizing social learning. In two experiments (N = 110), we investigate the developmental trajectory of appropriation errors and examine social‐...
Parents modulate their speech and their actions during infant-directed interactions, and these modulations facilitate infants' language and action learning, respectively. But do these behaviors and their benefits cross these modality boundaries? We investigated mothers' infant-directed speech and actions while they demonstrated the action-effects o...
Crucial for interacting successfully with other people is the ability to coordinate one's actions with those of others. Interpersonal coordination can be planned or emergent (spontaneous). Although typically easy for adults, coordinating successfully and smoothly with others may be far from trivial for infants and toddlers. What do we know about th...
Research into the developing sense of agency has traditionally focused on sensitivity to sensorimotor contingencies, but whether this implies the presence of a causal action-effect model has recently been called into question. Here, we investigated whether 3- to 4.5-month-old infants build causal action-effect models by focusing on behavioral and n...
We investigated the cognitive mechanisms underlying turn-taking joint action in 42-month-old children (Experiment 1) and adults (Experiment 2) using a behavioral task of dressing a virtual bear together. We aimed to investigate how participants represent a partners’ behavior, i.e., in terms of specific action kinematics or of action effects. The be...
Humans generate internal models of their environment to predict events in the world. As the environments change, our brains adjust to these changes by updating their internal models. Here, we investigated whether and how 9-month-old infants differentially update their models to represent a dynamic environment. Infants observed a predictable sequenc...
Body movements, as well as faces, communicate emotions. Research in adults has shown that the perception of action kinematics has a crucial role in understanding others’ emotional experiences. Still, little is known about infants’ sensitivity to body emotional expressions, since most of the research in infancy focused on faces. While there is some...
Parents tend to modulate their movements when demonstrating actions to their infants. Thus far, these modulations have primarily been quantified by human raters and for entire interactions, thereby possibly overlooking the intricacy of such demonstrations. Using optical motion tracking, the precise modulations of parents’ infant‐directed actions we...
Top-down control processes are essential for guiding attention and working memory towards task-relevant information. Recently, theta oscillations were suggested as critical for these cognitive processes. Infant studies testing a mixture of bottom-up and top-down processes support adult theta findings. Yet, since infants cannot be instructed, it rem...
Recent research has suggested that all types of size-related information are linked by a generalised system that codes for domain-independent magnitudes. This generalized system is further suggested to be acquired through everyday sensorimotor experiences with contingencies of size-related information in the real world. The aim of the present study...
Motor theories of action prediction propose that our motor system combines prior knowledge with incoming sensory input to predict other people's actions. This prior knowledge can be acquired through observational experience, with statistical learning being one candidate mechanism. But can knowledge learned through observation alone transfer into pr...
Sensitivity to the regularities and structure contained within sequential, goal-directed actions is an important building block for generating expectations about the actions we observe. Until now, research on statistical learning for actions has solely focused on individual action sequences, but many actions in daily life involve multiple actors in...
Dataset.
This file contains the processed data used for statistical analyses.
(CSV)
Prior knowledge affects how we perceive the world and the sensorimotor system actively guides our perception. An ongoing dispute regards the extent to which prior motor knowledge versus conceptual knowledge modulates the observation of others’ actions. Research indicates that motor experience increases motor activation during action perception. Oth...
Whether we hand over objects to someone, play a team sport, or make music together, social interaction often involves interpersonal action coordination, both during instances of cooperation and entrainment. Neural mirroring is thought to play a crucial role in processing other’s actions and is therefore considered important for social interaction....
The planning and adjusting of one’s actions in relation to an action partner is fundamental to smooth joint action. During their first years of life, children gradually become more engaged in joint actions. Here, we investigated whether and at what age children take their partner into account in their action plans to accommodate the other’s actions...
Predicting others' actions is essential for well-coordinated social interactions. In two experiments including an infant population, this study addresses to what extent motor experience of an observer determines prediction accuracy for others' actions. Results show that infants who were proficient crawlers but inexperienced walkers predicted crawli...
Previous research demonstrates that from early in life, our cortical sensorimotor areas are activated both when performing and when observing actions (mirroring). Recent findings suggest that the adult motor system is also involved in detecting others' rule violations. Yet, how this translates to everyday action errors (e.g., accidentally dropping...
From early in life, young children eagerly engage in social interactions. Yet, they still have difficulties in performing well-coordinated joint actions with others. Adult literature suggests that two processes are important for smooth joint action coordination: action prediction and inhibitory control. The aim of the current study was to disentang...
External feedback provides essential information for successful learning. Feedback is especially important for learning in early childhood, as toddlers strongly rely on external signals to determine the consequences of their actions. In adults, many electrophysiological studies have elucidated feedback processes using a neural marker called the fee...
Many actions involve multiple action steps, which raises the question how far ahead people plan when they perform such actions. Here, we examined higher-order planning for action sequences and whether people planned similarly or differently when acting individually or together with an action partner. For individual performances, participants picked...
When we are engaged in a joint action, we need to integrate our partner's actions with our own actions. Previous research has shown that in adults the involvement of one's own motor system is enhanced during observation of an action partner as compared to during observation of an individual actor. The aim of this study was to investigate whether si...
When acting jointly with others, adults can be as proficient as when acting individually. However, how young children coordinate their actions with another person and how their action coordination develops during early childhood is not well understood. By means of a sequential button-pressing game, which could be played jointly or individually, the...