No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
Disentangling the Social and the Pedagogical in Infants' Learning about Tool‐Use
Social Development
Abstract
We investigated infants' response to pedagogy in the domain of tool use. In experiment 1, infants viewed a causally relevant tool-use demonstration presented identically in either a social/pedagogical or social/non-pedagogical context. Infants exposed to pedagogical cues displayed superior production of the tool-use sequence. This was so despite infants displaying equivalent attention to the demonstration across conditions. In contrast, pedagogical cues had no systematic impact on infants' discrimination between causally possible vs. impossible tool-use sequences in a looking-time task. Interestingly, however, older infants across both conditions displayed a preference for looking toward the causally possible display. Experiment 2 documented that social cues of any sort (regardless of pedagogy) accompanying the demonstration triggered older infants to discriminate the causally possible vs. impossible events whereas a non-social demonstration did not. Together, the two experiments implicate ‘social gating’ as well as a pedagogical stance in infants' processing and execution of causal action.
... In this work, researchers have opted to provide a range of cues signaling pedagogy, and the fact that systematic effects on children's learning were obtained suggests that at least some subset of these cues might play a role in successful pedagogical interactions. To illustrate, Sage and Baldwin (2011) presented infants with either a pedagogical (cues like eye contact/pointing directed to infant), social (identical motion stream, but adult acted as if performing actions for herself; no cues directed towards infant), or non-social (only hands visible; no cues or facial information) demonstration of using a hooked tool to retrieve an out-of-reach toy. The pedagogical and social demonstrations were both inherently social in that a person was present and demonstrating the skill for infants; however, infants were only exposed to specific cues indicative of pedagogy in the prior case. ...
... If in fact these cues are ubiquitous across interaction contexts, one wonders how they act to specifically signal pedagogical intent. On the other hand, however, a body of existing findings clearly indicates that infants read these cues as indicative of pedagogical intent, and alter their processing accordingly (e.g., Gergely, Egyed, & Kiraly, 2007;Sage & Baldwin, 2011;Topal et al., 2008). Alternatively, then, equivalent rates of pedagogical cues across teaching and play contexts might arise because pedagogy indeed is nearly ubiquitous in the way parents are inclined to interact with children, perhaps especially when invited into a laboratory setting. ...
... One important set of issues to consider concerns validation of the phenomenon of natural pedagogy as a viable construct. That is, prior work (e.g., Csibra & Gergely, 2009;Gergely & Csibra, 2005;2006;Sage & Baldwin, 2011;Topal et al., 2008) postulates the pedagogy phenomenon and attendant cues to pedagogy, but asyet little work validates the pedagogy construct explicitly. Consider discriminant validity; is pedagogy a unique construct, distinguishable from related phenomena like parental engagement or sensitivity? ...
Recent developmental work demonstrates a range of effects of pedagogical cues on childhood learning. The present work investigates natural pedagogy in informal parent-child play. Preschool-aged children participated in free play and a toy task with a parent in addition to a toy task with an experimenter. Sessions were extensively coded for use of pedagogical cues, such as eye contact and pointing. We present a series of analyses investigating the pedagogical cues that characterized natural pedagogy, how these cues related, and how cues bundled into facets. Implications for future research and determining the validity of these measures of natural pedagogy are discussed.
... 9 CRADLE OF SOCIAL LEARNING compared with when they incidentally observe these demonstrations. For example, 8-to 13-month-old infants who are directly addressed prior to viewing a tool use demonstration are more likely to later successfully use the tool than infants who observe a nonengaging actor (Sage & Baldwin, 2011). Similarly, at 14 months, children who are shown a novel action by a demonstrator (a person turning on a lamp by pressing a button with her head) are more likely to imitate this action, as compared to a similar but rationally explainable action (a person turning on a lamp with her head while her hands are occupied), under conditions of ostensive engagement than under conditions of no social engagement . ...
... Unlike words, actions can be appropriately modeled outside of social contexts. This kind of nonsocial imitative learning was tested in most of the aforementioned studies (Brugger et al., 2007;Kiraly et al., 2013;Nielsen, 2006;Sage & Baldwin, 2011). Across these studies, the nonostensive model talked into space (not to a communicative partner), leaving open the question of whether or not children would show imitative behavior from a pedagogical and social interaction, but one that did not directly involve them (paralleling the observational word learning studies reviewed above). ...
... Several studies have found that young children are more likely to imitate actions presented in child-directed interaction than not, even when they allocate equal attention to directed and observed events. Sage & Baldwin, 2011;Shneidman et al., 2014). This suggests that the benefits of child-directed communication extend beyond proximal attentional focusing. ...
Theorists have proposed that child-directed, ostensive interactions provide a critical point of entry for supporting children’s learning from others, either because they render the intentions of a teacher easier to understand (e.g., Barresi & Moore, 1996; Moore, 2010; Tomasello, 1999) or because they mark information as culturally important and generalizable (e.g., Csibra & Gergely, 2009). This article evaluates these proposals in light of data from U.S. and European children, as well as from communities where directed interactions with young children are rare. The evidence reviewed from both bodies of work leave reason to doubt the claim that directed interactions provide automatic and innate informational value for learners. Instead, the value of child-directed teaching contexts likely stems from 2 factors: how these interactions focus children’s attention in the moment, and how children learn to reason pragmatically regarding the value child-directed contexts have.
... While infants are proficient imitators, recent research suggests that not all social situations are equally informative for fostering imitative behaviors for infants living in communities where directed teaching is commonplace. In several studies 11-to 18-month-old infants were more likely to faithfully copy others' actions when they were directly taught the action (e.g. when the actor looked at and talked to the infant), as compared to when they simply observed these actions (Brugger, Lariviere, Mumme & Bushnell, 2007; Kir aly, Csibra & Gergely, 2013; Matheson, Moore & Akhtar, 2013; Nielsen, 2006; Sage & Baldwin, 2011; Shneidman, Todd & Woodward, 2014). For example, at 18 months, infants were more likely to imitate the particular means of a demonstrated novel action (like using the head to turn on a light, or an elbow to activate a switch) when an experimenter looked and talked to the infant while performing the action, as compared to when she talked to herself (Matheson et al., 2013) or to another person (). ...
... For example, at 18 months, infants were more likely to imitate the particular means of a demonstrated novel action (like using the head to turn on a light, or an elbow to activate a switch) when an experimenter looked and talked to the infant while performing the action, as compared to when she talked to herself (Matheson et al., 2013) or to another person (). Differential imitation following child-directed and observed events occurred even when infants deployed equal visual attention to these contexts, suggesting that child-directed situations provide informational value beyond the ways in which they shape infants' attention in the moment (Sage & Baldwin, 2011;). These findings have led social learning theorists to conclude that child-directed interactions critically support early learning (e.g. ...
... Given these properties of infants' early social experiences , in Study 1 we consider whether Yucatec Mayan infants display the same pattern of responses to childdirected and observed contexts as infants from the United States have demonstrated in prior studies (e.g. Brugger et al., 2007; Kir aly et al., 2013; Matheson et al., 2013; Nielsen, 2006; Sage & Baldwin, 2011;). Using a nearly identical procedure as , we ask if Mayan infants, like US infants, demonstrate more robust imitative behavior when directly addressed as compared to when observing an interaction. ...
In several previous studies, 18-month-old infants who were directly addressed demonstrated more robust imitative behaviors than infants who simply observed another's actions, leading theorists to suggest that child-directed interactions carried unique informational value. However, these data came exclusively from cultural communities where direct teaching is commonplace, raising the possibility that the findings reflect regularities in infants' social experiences rather than responses to innate or a priori learning mechanisms. The current studies consider infants' imitative learning from child-directed teaching and observed interaction in two cultural communities, a Yucatec Mayan village where infants have been described as experiencing relatively limited direct instruction (Study 1) and a US city where infants are regularly directly engaged (Study 2). Eighteen-month-old infants from each community participated in a within-subjects study design where they were directly taught to use novel objects on one day and observed actors using different objects on another day. Mayan infants showed relative increases in imitative behaviors on their second visit to the lab as compared to their first visit, but there was no effect of condition. US infants showed no difference in imitative behavior in the child-directed vs. observed conditions; however, infants who were directly addressed on their first visit showed significantly higher overall imitation rates than infants who observed on their first visit. Together, these findings call into question the idea that child-directed teaching holds automatic or universal informational value.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
... Recent findings have highlighted the important role that childdirected teaching contexts play in supporting action imitation. Between 15 and 18 months, young children are more likely to faithfully imitate an individual's actions when they are directly addressed than when they simply observe her actions [1][2][3][4][5]. For example, 18-month-old children who watch a person using her head to turn on a light, or her elbow to activate a switch, are more likely to imitate the particular manner of these actions when they are directly engaged than when they view a non-communicative individual [3]. ...
... A few studies have considered children's attention to childdirected and observed actors, and have found no differences in attentional allocation (e.g., [2], [5]). However, these studies used gross measures of attention (e.g. ...
... In order to explore these alternative possibilities, it is necessary to know if children imitate more robustly following a childdirected teaching context than from a situation where they observe a social and pedagogical interaction. However, most studies that have considered children's action learning from child-directed or observed actors have contrasted a child-directed teaching interaction with a demonstration where an actor spoke to no one (e.g., [1], [2], [4], [5]). A few recent studies ( [3], [29]) have included a condition where children watched a 3 rd party teaching interaction. ...
Child-directed cues support imitation of novel actions at 18 months, but not at two years of age. The current studies explore the mechanisms that underlie the propensity that children have to copy others at 18 months, and how the value of child-directed communication changes over development. We ask if attentional allocation accounts for children's failure to imitate observed actions at 18 months, and their success at two years of age, and we explore the informational value child-directed contexts may provide across ontogeny. Eighteen-month-old (Study 1) and two-year-old (Study 2) children viewed causally non-obvious actions performed by child-directed (Study 1 & 2), observed (Study 1 & 2), or non-interactive (Study 2) actors, and their visual attention and imitative behaviors were assessed. Results demonstrated that child-directed contexts supported imitative learning for 18-month-old children, independent of their effects on proximal attention. However, by two years of age, neither directness nor communication between social partners was a necessary condition for supporting social imitation. These findings suggest that developmental changes in children's propensity to extract information from observation cannot be accounted for by changes in children's interpretation of what counts as child-directed information, and are likely not due to changes in how children allocate attention to observed events.
... Developmental psychologists, especially, emphasize the importance of communicative demonstrations. This is because such social interactions enable infants and children to learn a range of useful behaviors and representations, including action types, subgoals, tool functions, causal structure, and normative concepts (Brand et al., 2002;Brugger et al., 2007;Buchsbaum et al., 2011;Butler et al., 2015;Hernik & Csibra, 2015;Hoehl et al., 2014;Király et al., 2013;Sage & Baldwin, 2011;Southgate et al., 2009). ...
... The previous adult experiments illustrate how belief-directed planning and pragmatic interpretation facilitate powerful forms of teaching and social learning. At the same time, the developmental literature documents a range of findings on the interpretation of communicative demonstration and their relation to learning action-guiding representations (Brugger et al., 2007;Buchsbaum et al., 2011;Butler et al., 2015;Hernik & Csibra, 2015;Hoehl et al., 2014;Király et al., 2013;Sage & Baldwin, 2011;Southgate et al., 2009). Having formalized the actor and observer roles in communicative demonstrations, we next compare the major qualitative predictions of our model against previous developmental findings. ...
Theory of mind enables an observer to interpret others' behavior in terms of unobservable beliefs, desires, intentions, feelings, and expectations about the world. This also empowers the person whose behavior is being observed: By intelligently modifying her actions, she can influence the mental representations that an observer ascribes to her, and by extension, what the observer comes to believe about the world. That is, she can engage in intentionally communicative demonstrations. Here, we develop a computational account of generating and interpreting communicative demonstrations by explicitly distinguishing between two interacting types of planning. Typically, instrumental planning aims to control states of the environment, whereas belief-directed planning aims to influence an observer's mental representations. Our framework extends existing formal models of pragmatics and pedagogy to the setting of value-guided decision-making, captures how people modify their intentional behavior to show what they know about the reward or causal structure of an environment, and helps explain data on infant and child imitation in terms of literal versus pragmatic interpretation of adult demonstrators' actions. Additionally, our analysis of belief-directed intentionality and mentalizing sheds light on the sociocognitive mechanisms that underlie distinctly human forms of communication, culture, and sociality. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).
... There is also evidence that, just as for adults, human infants process events differently depending on whether or not those events occur in a social context. Others' attentional shifts cue infants' attention from birth (Farroni, Massaccesi, Pividori, & Johnson, 2004) and much work in recent years has shown that embedding events in ostensive contexts modulates and enhances infants' processing of language (Kuhl, 2007), actions (de Klerk, Hamilton, & Southgate, 2018;Király, Csibra, & Gergely, 2013;Sage & Baldwin, 2011;Senju & Csibra, 2008;Topál, Gergely, Miklǒsi, Erdőhegyi, & Csibra, 2008), and objects (Howard & Woodward, 2019;Yoon, Johnson, & Csibra, 2008). In a series of studies exploiting the gaze-cueing paradigm, 4-month-olds exhibited evidence of greater encoding of objects that had previously been cued by gaze than objects that had not (Michel, Pauen, & Hoehl, 2017;Michel, Wronski, Pauen, Daum, & Hoehl, 2019;Reid & Striano, 2005;Reid, Striano, Kaufman, & Johnson, 2004;Wahl, Michel, Pauen, & Hoehl, 2013). ...
... However, while ostension certainly enhances infants' encoding, even social contexts without ostension, such as someone else's action on an object, enhances memory for that object beyond what is encoded in a nonsocial context (Howard & Woodward, 2019). Thus, others' attention, and the targets of their attention, receive enhanced encoding by infants (Sage & Baldwin, 2011). ...
From early in life, human infants appear capable of taking others’ perspectives, and can do so even when the other’s perspective conflicts with the infant’s perspective. Infants’ success in perspective-taking contexts implies that they are managing conflicting perspectives despite a wealth of data suggesting that doing so relies on sufficiently mature Executive Functions, and is a challenge even for adults. In a new theory, I propose that infants can take other’s perspectives because they have an altercentric bias. This bias results from a combination of the value that human cognition places on others’ attention, and an absence of a competing self-perspective, which would, in older children, create a conflict requiring resolution by Executive Functions. A self-perspective emerges with the development of cognitive self-awareness, sometime in the second year of life, at which point it leads to competition between perspectives. This theory provides a way of explaining infants’ ability to take others’ perspectives, but raises the possibility that they could do so without representing or understanding the implications of perspective for others’ mental states.
... between the child and screen, and actions contingent with the actress' bids, were quite supportive of learning in our task. As in Sage and Baldwin's (2011) study, our social cue manipulations occurred prior to the teaching demonstration. As such, parent modeling did not simply highlight particular actions during the labeling (parents no longer modeled actions at this point) but instead acted to establish beforehand that the following demonstration was pedagogical in nature, enhancing subsequent learning. ...
... As such, parent modeling did not simply highlight particular actions during the labeling (parents no longer modeled actions at this point) but instead acted to establish beforehand that the following demonstration was pedagogical in nature, enhancing subsequent learning. We believe that parents' participation cued children that the information the person on screen subsequently presented was intended for them, similar to the effect of social cue interventions used by other researchers to establish an in-person adult's pedagogical intent (Sage & Baldwin, 2011;Topál et al., 2008). It is also possible that the mere presence of the parent facing the screen during the labeling demonstration helped to maintain children's attention in the modeling conditions. ...
Social cues are one way young children determine that a situation is pedagogical in nature-containing information to be learned and generalized. However, some social cues (e.g., contingent gaze and responsiveness) are missing from prerecorded video, a potential reason why toddlers' language learning from video can be inefficient compared with their learning directly from a person. This study explored two methods for supporting children's word learning from video by adding social-communicative cues. A sample of 88 30-month-olds began their participation with a video training phase. In one manipulation, an on-screen actress responded contingently to children through a live video feed (similar to Skype or FaceTime "video chat") or appeared in a prerecorded demonstration. In the other manipulation, parents either modeled responsiveness to the actress's on-screen bids for participation or sat out of their children's view. Children then viewed a labeling demonstration on video, and their knowledge of the label was tested with three-dimensional objects. Results indicated that both on-screen contingency and parent modeling increased children's engagement with the actress during training. However, only parent modeling increased children's subsequent word learning, perhaps by revealing the symbolic (representational) intentions underlying this video. This study highlights the importance of adult co-viewing in helping toddlers to interpret communicative cues from video.
... These early processes may underlie more complex forms of object-related knowledge and learning, such as the acquisition of culturally relevant information like functions, labels, or ritualistic actions. Studies with older children have shown that eye contact, within joint attention interactions, influences complex learning outcomes, including the learning of object-related words, actions, and tool-use functions (Hirotani et al. 2009;Matheson, Moore, and Akhtar 2013;Sage and Baldwin 2011). This suggests that the infants' responses in the object processing paradigm may represent precursors to these later abilities or reflect shared underlying mechanisms. ...
Infants are highly sensitive to social stimuli from early on in ontogeny. Social cues, including others' gaze, not only capture and guide infants' attention, but also modulate the efficiency in which the infant (brain) encodes and recognizes information. Over
the last two decades, the novelty preference based object‐processing paradigm has been instrumental in investigating this
phenomenon experimentally. This paper offers a comprehensive review and critical evaluation of methodological aspects and
empirical findings from previous research using this paradigm to study the influence of (non‐)social cues on infants' object
processing. We highlight the critical role of methodological details and discuss influential factors such as eye contact, infants'
object‐directed attention, naturalistic environments, and potential neural correlates associated with enhanced object encoding.
A comprehensive review table summarizes key methodological details from previous studies to assist researchers in making
informed decisions when designing future studies. We conclude that the object‐processing paradigm has proven to be an
effective method with high potential for future research disentangling the influence of fine‐grained factors on infants' object memory.
... In studying the efficacy of features of the early language environment in primarily Western settings, researchers have suggested that there may be a single, optimal pathway to language (7; or indeed, any sort of cultural learning: 8-10)-one that involves frequent adult speech to children, even before children can meaningfully reply (child-directed language). Decades of research in this tradition have highlighted language occurring within one-on-one interactions between caregivers and young children as the primary driver of language development (11)(12)(13)(14), suggesting that increases in the quantity and quality of childdirected language lead to increased language processing efficiency, vocabulary growth, optimal brain development-and ultimately, increased educational attainment-for children (15)(16)(17)(18)(19)(20)(21)(22)(23). This body of work has led some to characterize sparsity of childdirected language as a form of early deprivation (24) and has spurred interventions globally to encourage caregivers to speak more to their young children (25). ...
Theories of language development—informed largely by studies of Western, middleclass infants—have highlighted the language that caregivers direct to children as a key driver of language learning. However, some have argued that language development unfolds similarly across environmental contexts, including those in which childdirected language is scarce. This raises the possibility that children are able to learn from other sources of language in their environments, particularly the language directed to others in their environment. We explore this hypothesis with infants in an indigenous Tseltal-speaking community in Southern Mexico who are rarely spoken to, yet have the opportunity to overhear a great deal of other-directed language by virtue of being carried on their mothers’ backs. Adapting a previously established gaze-tracking method for detecting early word knowledge to our field setting, we find that Tseltal infants exhibit implicit knowledge of common nouns (Exp. 1), analogous to their US peers who are frequently spoken to. Moreover, they exhibit comprehension of Tseltal honorific terms that are exclusively used to greet adults in the community (Exp. 2), representing language that could only have been learned through overhearing. In so doing, Tseltal infants demonstrate an ability to discriminate words with similar meanings and perceptually similar referents at an earlier age than has been shown among Western children. Together, these results suggest that for some infants, learning from overhearing may be an important path toward developing language.
... They demonstrated that when the communicators made a special effort to show that they recognized the infant as an individual, calling them by their name, smiling at them, responding sensitively to their actions in an attuned manner, the infant took the knowledge they communicated as relevant to them, to be remembered and generalizable to other similar situations. The model of natural pedagogy suggests that ostensive signals (Russell 1967) preceding or accompanying such interactions trigger an innate learning system, the biological mechanism selected by evolution to ensure flexible adaptation (Laland 2017), which enables the child to acquire knowledge from a single act of demonstration. This is because the ostensive signals BEYOND MENTALIZING (attunement, smiling) have alerted the infant that the content of the demonstration is relevant for them to take on board, it is part of cultural knowledge, and is generalizable to other contexts (similar objects, similar occasions, different people). ...
... They reveal that adult-child interactions involving eye contact and mutually shared attention to an object (vs. parallel attention to an object lacking eye contact) support children's learning of object-related actions, word labels, or tool-use functions during the second year of life (Hirotani et al., 2009;Matheson et al., 2013;Sage & Baldwin, 2011). Moreover, studies focusing on the early stages of memory formation suggest that the learning-facilitating effect of joint attention develops well before children engage in action imitation or word learning. ...
Sharing joint visual attention to an object with another person biases infants to encode qualitatively different object properties compared to a parallel attention situation lacking interpersonal sharedness. This study investigated whether merely observing joint attention amongst others shows the same effect. In Experiment 1 (first-party replication experiment), N = 36 9-month-old German infants were presented with a violation-of-expectation task during which they saw an adult looking either in the direction of the infant (eye contact) or to the side (no eye contact) before and after looking at an object. Following an occlusion phase, infants saw one of three different outcomes: the same object reappeared at the same screen position (no change), the same object reappeared at a novel position (location change), or a novel object appeared at the same position (identity change). We found that infants looked longer at identity change outcomes (vs. no changes) in the “eye contact” condition compared to the “no eye contact” condition. In contrast, infants’ response to location changes was not influenced by the presence of eye contact. In Experiment 2, we found the same result pattern in a matched third-party design, in which another sample of N = 36 9-month-old German infants saw two adults establishing eye contact (or no eye contact) before alternating their gaze between an object and their partner without ever looking at the infant. These findings indicate that infants learn similarly from interacting with others and observing others interact, suggesting that infant cultural learning extends beyond infant-directed interactions.
... Children require social communicative cues to indicate what they should learn, and these cues are impoverished or less accessible when they are delivered via prerecorded mechanisms. Aligned with this perspective is the social gating hypothesis according to which learners are especially attuned to information presented in a socially contingent context (Sage & Baldwin, 2011), and hence children do not garner as much information from video due to the absence of a socially contingent partner. Following these viewpoints, ameliorating the video deficit should be achievable by enhancing the social contingency of video. ...
The "video deficit" is a well-documented effect whereby children learn less well about information delivered via a screen than the same information delivered in person. Research suggests that increasing social contingency may ameliorate this video deficit. The current study instantiated social contingency to screen-based information by embodying the screen within a socially interactive robot presented to urban Australian children with frequent exposure to screen-based communication. We failed to document differences between 22- to 26-month-old children's (N = 80) imitation of screen-based information embedded in a social robot and in-person humans. Furthermore, we did not replicate the video deficit with children imitating at similar levels regardless of the presentation medium. This failure to replicate supports the findings of a recent meta-analysis of video deficit research whereby there appears to be a steady decrease over time in the magnitude of the video deficit effect. We postulate that, should the video deficit effect be truly dwindling in effect size, the video deficit may soon be a historical artifact as children begin perceiving technology as relevant and meaningful in everyday life more and more. This research finds that observational-based learning material can be successfully delivered in person, via a screen, or via a screen embedded in a social robot.
... Children require social communicative cues to indicate what they should learn and these cues are impoverished or less accessible when they are delivered via pre-recorded mechanisms. Aligned with this perspective is the social gating hypothesis according to which learners are especially attuned to information presented in a socially contingent context (Sage & Baldwin, 2011) and hence children do not garner as much information from video due to the absence of a socially contingent partner. Following these viewpoints, ameliorating the video deficit should be achievable by enhancing the social contingency of video. ...
The video deficit is a well-documented effect whereby children learn less well about information delivered via a screen than the same information delivered in person. Research suggests that increasing social contingency may ameliorate this ‘video deficit’ (Nielsen et al., 2008). The current study instantiated social contingency to screen-based information by embodying the screen within a socially interactive robot. We failed to document any difference between 22- to 26-month-old children’s (N = 80) imitation of screen-based information embedded in a social robot and in person humans. Further, we were unable to replicate the video deficit with children imitating at similar levels regardless of the presentation medium. This failure to replicate supports the findings of a recent meta-analysis of video deficit research whereby there appears to be a steady decrease over time in the magnitude of the video deficit effect. We postulate that the video deficit may soon be a historical artifact as children begin perceiving technology as relevant and meaningful in everyday life more and more. This research finds that observational-based learning material can be successfully delivered in person, via a screen, or via a screen embedded in a social robot.
... Although nonsocial rewards merely indicate that a given behavior is valuable (e.g., food delivery reinforcing lever pressing), social rewards signal that our peers want us to continue the behavior that is being reinforced (Ho, MacGlashan, Littman, & Cushman, 2017). From a very early age, humans have an automatic tendency to infer what others are trying to communicate upon receiving feedback (Bonawitz et al., 2011;Sage & Baldwin, 2011) and use this information to inform future behaviors (Egyed, Király, & Gergely, 2013). For example, when a mother encourages a child to share, the child may infer that sharing is a desired social norm he or she should follow. ...
With more than 3 billion users, online social networks represent an important venue for moral and political discourse and have been used to organize political revolutions, influence elections, and raise awareness of social issues. These examples rely on a common process to be effective: the ability to engage users and spread moralized content through online networks. Here, we review evidence that expressions of moral emotion play an important role in the spread of moralized content (a phenomenon we call moral contagion). Next, we propose a psychological model called the motivation, attention, and design (MAD) model to explain moral contagion. The MAD model posits that people have group-identity-based motivations to share moral-emotional content, that such content is especially likely to capture our attention, and that the design of social-media platforms amplifies our natural motivational and cognitive tendencies to spread such content. We review each component of the model (as well as interactions between components) and raise several novel, testable hypotheses that can spark progress on the scientific investigation of civic engagement and activism, political polarization, propaganda and disinformation, and other moralized behaviors in the digital age.
... Social factors affecting learning include perceived intentions, competence, past accuracy, and social status of the informant or teacher (for reviews see Harris, 2012;Over & Carpenter, 2012;Tomasello, 1999). Furthermore, pedagogical cues, such as infant-directed speech (Eaves, Feldman, Griffiths, & Shafto, 2016), mutual gaze and joint attention (Striano, Chen, Cleveland, & Bradshaw, 2006), and explicit linguistic cues Gelman, Ware, Manczak, & Graham, 2013), have been shown to selectively affect children's learning (Sage & Baldwin, 2011) in a way that is argued to not be able to be explained by heightened attention (but see Gredebäck, Astor, & Fawcett, 2018;Szufnarowska, Rohlfing, Fawcett, & Gredebäck, 2014). ...
Children are sensitive to both social and non‐social aspects of the learning environment. Among social cues, pedagogical communication has been shown to not only play a role in children's learning, but also in their own active transmission of knowledge. Vredenburgh, Kushnir and Casasola, Developmental Science, 2015, 18, 645 showed that 2‐year‐olds are more likely to demonstrate an action to a naive adult after learning it in a pedagogical than in a non‐pedagogical context. This finding was interpreted as evidence that pedagogically transmitted information has a special status as culturally relevant. Here we test the limits of this claim by setting it in contrast with an explanation in which the relevance of information is the outcome of multiple interacting social (e.g., pedagogical demonstration) and non‐social properties (e.g., action complexity). To test these competing hypotheses, we varied both pedagogical cues and action complexity in an information transmission paradigm with 2‐year‐old children. In Experiment 1, children preferentially transmitted simple non‐pedagogically demonstrated actions over pedagogically demonstrated more complex actions. In Experiment 2, when both actions were matched for complexity, we found no evidence of preferential transmission of pedagogically demonstrated actions. We discuss possible reasons for the discrepancy between our results and previous literature showing an effect of pedagogical cues on cultural transmission, and conclude that our results are compatible with the view that pedagogical and other cues interact, but incompatible with the theory of a privileged role for pedagogical cues.
... Among WEIRD communities (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic nations;Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010), dyads commonly engage in triadic interactions, in which parents and infants jointly attend to objects in front of them (Tomasello, 1995). In triadic interactions, mothers promote infant learning by conveying relevant information about objects through didactic language and explicit visual cues such as pointing and altering their gaze between objects and infants (Gliga & Csibra, 2009;Sage & Baldwin, 2011). Moreover, among WEIRD communities, environments contain an abundance of objects, and parents instruct, model, and encourage infants' play with toys (Tamis-LeMonda & Bornstein, 1996;Tamis-LeMonda, Kuchirko, Escobar, & Bornstein, 2019). ...
To understand the developmental outcomes of Latinx children growing up poor in the United States, we examine how socioeconomic status (SES) and ethnic minority status jointly condition the development of Latinx children in the United States. To address these gaps, in this chapter we first present a brief demographic profile of Latinx in the United States to contextualize the later theoretical and empirical discussions. We then review theoretical frameworks that explain SES differences in Latinx home environments and examine how they have been used to explain disparities in Latinx children's outcomes. Third, we describe the current research on the early home environments of Latinx children of varying levels of parental SES. Fourth, we review the literature on Latinx children's inequalities noting the scarcity of research that compares Latinx to White children or Latinx to Black children compared to the studies that focus on the White-Black academic gap. Finally, we conclude by summarizing state of knowledge and offering suggestions for future directions. We focus on young children (0-8) due to space limitations but also because the early childhood period is foundational to later development and is where the effects of poverty most likely to have enduring effects.
... Among WEIRD communities (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic nations;Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010), dyads commonly engage in triadic interactions, in which parents and infants jointly attend to objects in front of them (Tomasello, 1995). In triadic interactions, mothers promote infant learning by conveying relevant information about objects through didactic language and explicit visual cues such as pointing and altering their gaze between objects and infants (Gliga & Csibra, 2009;Sage & Baldwin, 2011). Moreover, among WEIRD communities, environments contain an abundance of objects, and parents instruct, model, and encourage infants' play with toys (Tamis-LeMonda & Bornstein, 1996;Tamis-LeMonda, Kuchirko, Escobar, & Bornstein, 2019). ...
Researchers in developmental science often examine parenting and child development by ethnic, racial, and socioeconomic groups, frequently highlighting group differences in parent and infant behaviors. A sole focus on differences, however, obscures notable variability that exists within each community. Moreover, categories such as ethnicity and race are often assumed to encompass shared cultural backgrounds, which risks conflating race, ethnicity, and culture in psychological research. In this chapter, we examine cultural specificity and within-group heterogeneity that characterizes parenting and child development across socio-economic, ethnic, and racial groups. Drawing upon our work on ethnically and socioeconomically diverse parents and infants, we document the between-group differences, within-group variation, and universal processes in the form and content of parent-infant interactions. Most centrally, we highlight the role of family economic, human, and social capital in explaining the variability in parent-infant interactions across racial, ethnic, and cultural groups
... While there are many studies on the phylogenetic origins of human tool-related behaviors, less attention has been paid to its development (Keen, 2011). Even in their first year of life, infants demonstrate the ability to use everyday tools, such as spoons or crooks and sticks, and to utilize social cues to use tools (see Keen, 2011;Sage & Baldwin, 2011). Brown (1990) shows that 2-to-4-year-old children can easily select functional tools to fetch a target. ...
Tool making has been proposed as a key force in driving the complexity of human material culture. The ontogeny of tool‐related behaviors hinges on social, representational, and creative factors. In this study, we test the associations between these factors in development across two different cultures. Results of Study 1 with 5‐to‐6‐year‐old Turkish children in dyadic or individual settings show that tool making is facilitated by social interaction, hierarchical representation, and creative abilities. Results of a second explorative study comparing the Turkish sample with a sample of 5‐to‐6‐year‐old children in New Zealand suggest that tool innovation might be affected by culture, and that the role of cognitive and creative factors diminishes through social interaction in tool making.
... For example, when 8-month-olds were presented with how to use a given tool accompanied by an experimenter's communicative cues of eye contact, child-directed speech, and gaze shifting, they showed a better tool use sequence than then when they saw the same information without those cues (Sage & Baldwin, 2011). Similarly, Träuble and Bätz (2014) found that 12-month-olds treat certain emotions as more generalizable to a specific object when the emotion was conveyed in a communicative context accompanied by eye contact. ...
The current dissertation examines how young children aged from 3 to 6 years come to understand learning from a mentalistic perspective, and how this understanding is related to their own learning. Study 1 found that preschoolers’ prediction of learning is influenced by the informant’s knowledge state, and that there is an age-related increase in the expectation of learning from another and sensitivity to an informant’s knowledge state. Children’s prediction of another’s learning was applied to their actual learning in Study 2, showing that children’s perception of an informant’s knowledge state affects how much information they themselves accept from the informants. Overall, the findings from Studies 1 and 2 demonstrated that children’s judgment of another’s knowledge affects not only their predictions about learning from him, but also their actual learning. Studies 3 and 4 broadened the framework to see how children consider not only the informant’s but also the learner’s mental states. Findings from Studies 3 and 4 indicated that young children come to understand that a person’s knowledge state influences the formation of the intention to learn, and that the judgment of the occurrence of learning requires a change in the learner’s knowledge. Study 5 further examined whether the knowledge-based judgments of another’s learning are applied to judgments of children’s own learning, and whether these judgments are related to how much and how they actually learn. As children judge another’s learning based on the learner’s knowledge, they judged the necessity and desire for their own learning based on their own knowledge state, and they determine whether they have learned based on the presence of knowledge change. Moreover, this knowledge-based reasoning about learning was uniquely related with how much they learned from an example learning situation, and with teacher ratings of their learning related-behavior in schools. The overall findings across five studies indicated that in early childhood, children come to understand learning on the basis of mental states, and that this emerging understanding has important implications for their metacognitive knowledge to regulate their learning as well as their actual learning.
... All children, regardless of condition, focused on the video throughout its duration of 34 s. Along with other data (Sage and Baldwin 2011), this finding refutes the idea that the advantages of pedagogical task presentations can be adequately explained by children attending more keenly to what they are shown. ...
This study examined 4-year-olds’ problem-solving under different social conditions. Children had to use water in order to extract a buoyant object from a narrow tube. When faced with the problem ‘cold’ without cues, nearly all children were unsuccessful (Experiment 1). But when a solution-suggesting video was pedagogically delivered prior to the task, most children (69% in Experiment 1, 75% in Experiment 2) succeeded. Showing children the same video in a non-pedagogical manner did not lift their performance above baseline (Experiment 1) and was less effective than framing it pedagogically (Experiments 1 and 2). The findings support ideas central to natural pedagogy (Csibra and Gergely Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 13(4), 148–153, 2009). They also challenge the Cultural Intelligence hypothesis, according to which only humans’ social, but not their physical, cognition differs qualitatively from that of great apes. A more radical, transformative variant of the Cultural Intelligence hypothesis is suggested according to which humans’ physical cognition is shaped by their social nature and must therefore be recognized as equally distinctive as their social cognition.
... Preschoolers' understanding of social aspects of learning might also be developmentally mediated. Given that infants engage in selective social learning across a variety of domains (e.g., Brooker & Poulin-Dubois, 2013;Tummeltshammer, Wu, Sobel, & Kirkham, 2014;Zmyj, Buttelmann, Carpenter, & Daum, 2010) and register pedagogical information in others' communication across multiple tasks (e.g., Pinkham & Jaswal, 2011;Sage & Baldwin, 2011;Topal, Gergely, Miklosi, Erdohegyi, & Csibra, 2008), we might expect very young children to appreciate the role of instruction for learning. Articulating a metacognitive understanding of how instruction leads to learning, however, might require a more representational understanding of knowledge change, as we argued above with regard to learning from action. ...
It is widely believed that exploration is a mechanism for young children's learning. The present investigation examines preschoolers’ beliefs about how learning occurs. We asked 3- to 5-year-olds to articulate how characters in a set of stories learned about a new toy. Younger preschoolers were more likely to overemphasize the role of characters’ actions in learning than older children were (Experiment 1, N = 53). Overall performance improved when the stories explicitly stated that characters were originally ignorant and clarified the characters’ actions, but general developmental trends remained (Experiment 2, N = 48). These data suggest that explicit metacognitive understanding of the relation between actions and learning is developing during the preschool years, which might have implications for how children learn from exploration.
... Human learning is a selective process [1][2][3]. From infancy onward, children are more likely to pay attention to and acquire knowledge from stimuli that are accompanied by another's communicative ("pedagogical") cues, such as eye contact and infant-directed speech and body language [4][5][6]. For example, typically developing preschoolers are more likely to focus on and imitate a novel action if the model establishes mutual gaze before the demonstration [7,8] or acts in a socially engaging manner [9,10]. ...
Background:
Early research has documented that young children show an increased interest toward objects that are verbally labeled by an adult, compared to objects that are presented without a label. It is unclear whether the same phenomenon occurs in neurodevelopmental disorders affecting social development, such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and Williams syndrome (WS).
Methods:
The present study used a novel eye-tracking paradigm to determine whether hearing a verbal label increases the salience of novel objects in 35 preschoolers with ASD, 18 preschoolers with WS, and 20 typically developing peers.
Results:
We found that typically developing children and those with WS, but not those with ASD, spent significantly more time looking at objects that are verbally labeled by an adult, compared to objects that are presented without a label.
Conclusions:
In children without ASD, information accompanied by the speaker's verbal label is accorded a "special status," and it is more likely to be attended to. In contrast, children with ASD do not appear to attribute a special salience to labeled objects compared to non-labeled objects. This result is consistent with the notion that reduced responsivity to pedagogical cues hinders social learning in young children with ASD.
... Social play with caregivers and objects facilitates the development of object knowledge (Striano, Chen, Cleveland, & Bradshaw, 2006;Wu, Gopnik, Richardson, & Kirkham, 2011) and person knowledge (De ak, Krasno, Triesch, Lewis, & Sepeta, 2014). Caregivers promote learning by transmitting relevant information about objects via overt, visual pedagogical cues, including pointing and gaze alternation (Csibra & Gergely, 2009;Sage & Baldwin, 2011). The social learning opportunities that adults provide for young children are facilitated and constrained by culture (Bornstein, 2012;Clegg & Legare, 2015;Herrmann, Legare, Harris, & Whitehouse, 2013;Legare & Nielsen, 2015;Legare, Wen, Herrmann, & Whitehouse, 2015;Mathew & Perreault, 2015). ...
Two studies examined the extent to which the type of triadic interaction pervasive in Western populations (i.e., shared visual attention and ostensive pedagogical cues) was representative of infant-caregiver object exploration in a Non-Western indigenous community. Caregivers in the U.S. and Vanuatu interacted with infants and a novel object for three minutes. In Study 1 (N = 116, Mage = 29.05), Ni-Van caregivers used more physical triadic engagement and U.S. caregivers used more visual triadic engagement. In Study 2 (N = 80, Mage = 29.91), U.S. caregivers were more likely than Ni-Van caregivers to transmit an action and to use visual cues while interacting with their child. These studies demonstrate that the Western model of early social learning is not universal.
... Csibra, Gergely and their colleagues argue that natural pedagogy should function in a wide range of domains; children should take advantage of their evolutionary inheritance to learn about food items, cultural practices, tool construction and use, in addition to more contemporary skills such as computer use, crossing the street, or even reading and writing (e.g., Csibra & Gergely 2006;Király et al. 2013). However, almost all experimental evidence provided in favor of the theory of natural pedagogy has focused on domains of artefacts: kinds (Futó et al. 2010;Topál et al. 2008;Yoon et al., 2008), functions (Sage & Baldwin, 2011), and valence of objects (Gergely et al., 2007;Egyed et al., 2013). Nonetheless, they argue that natural pedagogy should function in other domains of human behaviors, including common practice, conventions, or traditions (Csibra & Gergely 2006;Király et al. 2013), words, religious superstitions, myths, rituals, and symbolic gestures 1 . ...
According to the theory of natural pedagogy, humans have a set of cognitive adaptations specialized for transmitting and receiving knowledge through teaching; young children can acquire generalizable knowledge from ostensive signals even in a single interaction, and adults also actively teach young children. In this article, we critically examine the theory and argue that ostensive signals do not always allow children to learn generalizable knowledge more efficiently, and that the empirical evidence provided in favor of the theory of natural pedagogy does not defend the theory as presented, nor does it support a weakened version of the theory. We argue that these problems arise because the theory of natural pedagogy is grounded in a misguided assumption, namely that learning about the world and learning about people are two distinct and independent processes. If, on the other hand, we see the processes as interrelated, then we have a better explanation for the empirical evidence.
... If overimitation and mimicry are dependent on the same underlying mechanism [17], we would predict that direct eye contact prior to an unnecessary action should increase the propensity to imitate. Indeed, studies of social learning indicate that ostensive cues increase imitation fidelity [28,41,42]. However, the results from this manipulation were contingent upon the age of the participant. ...
Children copy the actions of others with high fidelity, even when they are not causally relevant. This copying of visibly unnecessary actions is termed overimitation. Many competing theories propose mechanisms for overimitation behaviour. The present study examines these theories by studying the social factors that lead children to overimitate actions. Ninety-four children aged 5- to 8-years each completed five trials of an overimitation task. Each trial provided the opportunity to overimitate an action on familiar objects with minimal causal reasoning demands. Social cues (live or video demonstration) and eye contact from the demonstrator were manipulated. After the imitation, children's ratings of action rationality were collected. Substantial overimitation was seen which increased with age. In older children, overimitation was higher when watching a live demonstrator and when eye contact was absent. Actions rated as irrational were more likely to be imitated than those rated as rational. Children overimitated actions on familiar objects even when they rated those actions as irrational, suggesting that failure of causal reasoning cannot be driving overimitation. Our data support social explanations of overimitation and show that the influence of social factors increases with age over the 5- to 8-year-old age range.
... This may have resulted in a weakening of the saliency of the parent's ostensive cues, making the exchange of information within a pedagogical context between the infant-parent dyad less effective and meaningful. Indeed, children are highly influenced by ostensive and communicative cues and are more inclined to imitate a source when these cues are present (Brugger, Lariviere, Mumme, & Bushnell, 2007;Király, Csibra, & Gergely, 2004;Sage & Baldwin, 2011;Southgate, Chevallier, & Csibra, 2009a,b). However, as the presence -but not intensity -of the parent's ostensive cues was explicitly measured, this conclusion can only be made speculatively. ...
This study set out to examine how toddlers' word learning, imitation, and instrumental helping would be affected by the emotional reliability of a familiar model. Therefore, forty-two 24-month-olds were observed in interactions with their primary caregiver, who was evaluated on the quality of his or her sensitive behavior, such as responsiveness and emotional availability. Parents were first instructed how to administer different tasks to their child that included: teaching a novel word, demonstrating an "irrational" means of putting a dog inside a toy house through the chimney instead of the door, and appearing in need of help. The parent-child dyad was then observed during a 10-min period and the parent's level of responsiveness and availability was subsequently coded from this interaction. Finally, children were examined as to whether they learned a novel word, imitated, and helped their caregiver. It was observed that toddlers learned novel words better from an emotionally reliable primary caregiver. In addition, higher parental responsiveness and availability predicted better imitation in older children and higher levels of helping in girls. Taken together, these findings are the first to suggest that the emotional reliability of a familiar model, such as a parent's sensitive nature and consistent responsiveness, influences young children's willingness to learn and help.
... But the absence of an early effect of demonstration may also be due to the way we provided the demonstration, which was relatively restricted in content and variety. If this is true, then adding more information to the demonstration such as pedagogical cues (e.g., Csibra & Gergely, 2006;Sage & Baldwin, 2011) and social cues (Kiraly, 2009;Nielsen, Simcock, & Jenkins, 2008), making the goal of the experimenter more obvious (Carpenter, Call, & Tomasello, 2002;Kiraly, 2009), and/or providing more instances would allow infants to learn the tool-use task from a demonstration earlier. In addition, as in many studies of social learning, we assessed infants' behavior directly after a demonstration. ...
Despite a growing interest in the question of tool-use development in infants, no study so far has systematically investigated how learning to use a tool to retrieve an out-of-reach object progresses with age. This was the first aim of this study, in which 60 infants, aged 14, 16, 18, 20, and 22months, were presented with an attractive toy and a rake-like tool. There were five conditions of spatial relationships between the toy and the tool, going from the toy and tool being connected to there being a large spatial gap between them. A second aim of the study was to evaluate at what age infants who spontaneously fail the task can learn this complex skill by being given a demonstration from an adult. Results show that even some of the youngest infants could spontaneously retrieve the toy when it was presented inside and touching the top part of the tool. In contrast, in conditions with a spatial gap, the first spontaneous successes were observed at 18months, suggesting that a true understanding of the use of the tool has not been fully acquired before that age. Interestingly, it is also at 18months that infants began to benefit from the demonstration in the conditions with a spatial gap. The developmental steps for tool use observed here are discussed in terms of changes in infants' ability to attend to more than one item in the environment. The work provides insight into the progressive understanding of tool use during infancy and into how observational learning improves with age.
Résumé L’utilisation d’un outil permet de dépasser les limites de son propre corps pour interagir avec l’environnement. Après avoir appris à contrôler sa main pour prendre des objets, le bébé découvre peu à peu qu’un objet peut permettre d’agir sur un autre objet. Dans cet article nous nous intéressons à la fonction particulière de l’outil qui permet de rapprocher un objet présenté hors de portée. Nous passons d’abord en revue les comportements précurseurs de cette habileté, comme l’utilisation de moyens intermédiaires pour atteindre un but secondaire ( means-end ), ainsi que les premières études consacrées à l’utilisation d’outil pour rapprocher un objet. Dans un deuxième temps nous posons la question des mécanismes sous-jacents à la découverte de cette utilisation de l’outil à partir des résultats d’une étude où nous avons suivi quatre bébés pendant près d’un an à partir de 12 mois en leur présentant un jouet hors de portée et un râteau à portée de main. Nos résultats montrent que les bébés mettent plusieurs séances avant de comprendre l’utilité du râteau, séances pendant lesquelles soit ils explorent le râteau, soit ils quémandent le jouet, soit ils associent le râteau et le jouet mais pas pour essayer de rapprocher le jouet. Ce n’est que vers 18 mois, relativement soudainement, que les bébés ont semblé comprendre que le râteau pouvait leur permettre de rapprocher le jouet. Au vu des résultats, nous concluons que les mécanismes « essai-erreur » et apprentissage par observation nécessitent un certain niveau d’intuition de la solution pour être efficaces, mais que l’intuition elle-même nécessite une longue phase d’exploration qui permet dans un premier temps à la fois d’améliorer la manipulation du râteau (qui devient un prolongement de la main ?) et d’en découvrir les affordances.
Children now participate in audio and video calls with their parents and relatives using smartphones. We assessed if video calls help children to have more expressive conversation. We talked with 60 children aged between four and eight years on audio and video calls using smartphones in a controlled environment. We observed how they participated in the conversation and if they could recall what they heard over a call and solve a problem involving physical artifacts while receiving help on a call. Video calls were found to engage children aged four to six years 32.84% and seven and eight years 47.75% longer than audio calls. The children used bodily gestures and interrupted the person with whom they were having conversation to make a point of their own more often on video calls. The difference in the number of children who could initiate audio and video calls was insignificant. We found that 67% of the children aged four to six years could recall a story they had heard on a video call, while only 27% of them could do so for audio calls. Additionally, 20% of the children aged seven and eight years could solve a problem involving physical artifacts when receiving instructions over video calls, while none of them could do so when receiving instructions on audio calls. Video calls can contribute in child development in several ways including instilling a sense of proximity and security among children. Specialized video chatting apps may be developed for children.
Young children often learn less from video than face‐to‐face presentations. Meta‐regression models were used to examine the average size of this difference (video deficit) and investigate moderators. An average deficit of about half of a standard deviation was reported across 122 independent effect sizes from 59 reports, involving children ages 0–6 years. Moderator analyses suggested (a) the deficit decreased with age, (b) object retrieval studies showed larger deficits than other domains, and (c) there was no difference between studies using live versus prerecorded video. Results are consistent with a multiple‐mechanism explanation for the deficit. However, the analyses highlighted potential quality and publication bias issues that may have resulted in overestimation of the effect and should be addressed by future researchers.
The theory of natural pedagogy provides a model of social learning based on the direct communicative ostensive relation and aimed to the transfer of generic cultural knowledge. The pedagogical transmission of information originates from an explicit manifestation of teaching made by knowledgeable adults, who are naturally inclined
to manifestly provide their cultural baggage to naïve conspecifics. The domain of transferable knowledge encompasses artifact functions, novel means actions, first words, gestural symbols, social practices, and rituals. This teaching process can be fast and efficient in virtue of a natural inclination possessed by infants to seek information and decode signals of ostensive communication. In this sense, the natural pedagogy represents, as the two proponents – György Gergey and Gergely Csibra – claim, «a communicative system of mutual design specialized for the fast and efficient transfer of new and relevant cultural knowledge from knowledge able to ignorant conspecifics». This
book suggests that natural pedagogy utilises early belief attribution competences, which are employed by infants in a variety of contexts to approach and navigate the social world. Therefore, the natural pedagogy, in cooperation with the early mindreading system,
may represent one of the most efficient adaptive strategies to firmly create that deep wittgensteinian «nest of propositions» which build cultural shared beliefs structures to be relied upon and followed.
Events-the experiences we think we are having and recall having had-are constructed; they are not what actually occurs. What occurs is ongoing dynamic, multidimensional, sensory flow, which is somehow transformed via psychological processes into structured, describable, memorable units of experience. But what is the nature of the redescription processes that fluently render dynamic sensory streams as event representations? How do such processes cope with the ubiquitous novelty and variability that characterize sensory experience? How are event-rendering skills acquired and how do event representations change with development? This review considers emerging answers to these questions, beginning with evidence that an implicit tendency to monitor predictability structure via statistical learning is key to event rendering. That is, one way that the experience of bounded events (e.g., actions within behavior, words within speech) arises is with the detection of "troughs" in sensory predictability. Interestingly, such troughs in predictability are often predictable; these regions of predictable-unpredictability provide articulation points to demarcate one event from another in representations derived from the actual streaming information. In our information-optimization account, a fluent event-processor predicts such troughs and selectively attends to them-while suppressing attention to other regions-as sensory streams unfold. In this way, usage of attentional resources is optimized for efficient sampling of the most relevant, information-rich portions of the unfolding flow of sensation. Such findings point to the development of event-processing fluency-whether in action, language, or other domains-depending crucially on rapid and continual cognitive reorganization. As knowledge of predictability grows, attention is adaptively redeployed. Accordingly, event experiences undergo continuous alteration.
Infants from low-income households typically spend less time exploring objects and use less mature strategies when they do explore compared to their higher-income peers (e.g., Clearfield et al., 2014). The current study tested a novel intervention designed to boost early object exploration in infants from low-income households. The intervention, called Play for Success, was administered through the Early Head Start home visiting program, and asked all infants to explore a toy with a caregiver for 10 min a day every day for two weeks. Forty-two 6- to 10-month-old infants were randomly assigned to one of three intervention groups: Social (unstructured direction), Teach Two (simple structured direction), or Teach Many (complex structured direction). Infants’ exploratory behaviors were tested three times: before the intervention, immediately following, and again four weeks later. The results demonstrated that only infants in Teach 2 maintained their level of exploration at both the post-test and 4 weeks later while infants in the other groups showed significant decreases in exploration over time. These results suggest that Play for Success is a promising new intervention, but only in the condition that included repeated simple structured direction.
Carrots and sticks motivate behavior, and people can teach new behaviors to other organisms, such as children or nonhuman animals, by tapping into their reward learning mechanisms. But how people teach with reward and punishment depends on their expectations about the learner. We examine how people teach using reward and punishment by contrasting two hypotheses. The first is evaluative feedback as reinforcement, where rewards and punishments are used to shape learner behavior through reinforcement learning mechanisms. The second is evaluative feedback as communication, where rewards and punishments are used to signal target behavior to a learning agent reasoning about a teacher's pedagogical goals. We present formalizations of learning from these 2 teaching strategies based on computational frameworks for reinforcement learning. Our analysis based on these models motivates a simple interactive teaching paradigm that distinguishes between the two teaching hypotheses. Across 3 sets of experiments, we find that people are strongly biased to use evaluative feedback communicatively rather than as reinforcement. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).
One hundred and sixteen Korean 3- to 5-year-olds were individually taught animal names through a game, either in a direct condition in which the instructional goal was stated or an indirect condition in which it was not. How much they learned and how well they understood the intentionality of teaching were also measured. Korean children seemed to have relatively rapid development in understanding of the intentionality of teaching, and this understanding was correlated with their identification of the goal of the game. The direct condition produced better learning for the children who had higher understanding of the intentionality of teaching.
Humans often attempt to influence one another’s behavior using rewards and punishments. How does this work? Psychologists have often assumed that “evaluative feedback” influences behavior via standard learning mechanisms that learn from environmental contingencies. On this view, teaching with evaluative feedback involves leveraging learning systems designed to maximize an organism’s positive outcomes. Yet, despite its parsimony, programs of research predicated on this assumption, such as ones in developmental psychology, animal behavior, and human-robot interaction, have had limited success. We offer an explanation by analyzing the logic of evaluative feedback and show that specialized learning mechanisms are uniquely favored in the case of evaluative feedback from a social partner. Specifically, evaluative feedback works best when it is treated as communicating information about the value of an action rather than as a form of reward to be maximized. This account suggests that human learning from evaluative feedback depends on inferences about communicative intent, goals and other mental states—much like learning from other sources, such as demonstration, observation and instruction. Because these abilities are especially developed in humans, the present account also explains why evaluative feedback is far more widespread in humans than non-human animals.
Tool use is the ability to act on an object with another object. In human infants, this ability develops toward the end of the second year of life. Despite a recent resurgence of interest in the study of tool-use learning in infancy, very little is known about the developmental steps in this learning or the underlying mechanisms. The present thesis presents a series of investigations on the age and conditions under which infants learn to use a tool to retrieve an out-of-reach object.
In a first cross-sectional study (Paper 1), based on a preliminary study on 5 infants followed longitudinally from 12 to 20 months of age (Appendices 2 and 3), infants aged 14 to 22 months were tested on a task involving the use of a rake-like tool to retrieve an out-of-reach toy. Infants' performance across variations in the spatial relationship between the rake and the toy was explored. The results showed that infants as young as 14 months of age succeeded spontaneously when the toy was initially placed against the rake or at least lay in the shortest trajectory between the rake and the infant. When the toy was placed at some distance from the rake, outside its shortest trajectory, infants only succeeded spontaneously at the task around 18 to 22 months of age. Likewise, when an adult demonstrated how to use the rake in the same spatial conditions, infants showed sensitivity to the demonstration only starting at 18 months of age. In a follow up of this study, a finer analysis of the data was conducted, which yielded insight on the age at which infants start to plan their action when using a tool (Paper 2). This analysis showed that before 18 months of age, infants were mostly influenced by their manual preference toward the right hand when grasping the tool. In contrast, starting 18 months, infants were more likely to vary the hand they used for grasping according to the toy's position in relation to the tool (right or left). These results show that infants who are in the phase of acquiring tool use are better able to anticipate the action than younger infants.
One observation from these first cross-sectional and longitudinal studies was of particular interest. When the toy was attached to the rake, all infants were spontaneously able to successfully retrieve the toy starting at 12 months of age. This suggests that at this age, infants have already acquired the notion of composite objects. In a complementary study, a significant change was observed between 6 and 9 months of age in the understanding of the notion of spatial connectedness between objects. Starting at 8 months of age, infants befan to show visual anticipation toward the distal part of the composite object when grasping its proximal part. Thus, 8-month-old infants use the notion of connectedness when acting on composite objects. This is in line with results from previous studies showing that around 10-12 months infants pull a string to which an out-of-reach object is attached before trying to grasp the object. However, in a pilot study where 16-month-old infants were presented a choice of several strings, only one of which was connected to the out-of-reach object, infants did not systematically choose the connected string. This led us to an investigation of why, at 16 months, infants do not use the notion of connectedness between objects in order to solve this task (Paper 3). To do so a study was conducted comparing infants' performance on the multiple strings task (action condition) with their looking behaviours at the same multiple-string scene when an adult solved the task in front of them (vision condition). The results showed that only infants who succeeded at the task themselves were able to visually anticipate which string the adult had to pull in order to retrieve the object. Additionally, the results showed that lack of inhibitory control partly explains infants' failure at the task.
A final study investigated why, in the previous studies, infants did not learn to use a tool by observation before 18 months of age. This result is surprising given the fact that infants can learn complex actions by observation before this age. One apparent possibility was that infants did not understand the demonstrator's intention, and thus did not perceive the function of the tool as they were not able to anticipate the action of the demonstrator. To test this hypothesis, a study was conducted on 16-month-old infants to investigate whether presenting elements indicating the demonstrator's intention would help infants learn to use a tool by observation before 18 months (Paper 4). Infants who saw the demonstrator explicitly show her intention to obtain the toy before demonstrating the target action showed enhanced performance after demonstration.
In conclusion, several mechanisms whose development is likely to influence the emergence of infants' capacity to use a tool are proposed, and in particular inhibitory control and action planning processes, as well as observational learning.
Past research has established that children typically learn better from live demonstrations than from two-dimensional (2D) media. In the present set of experiments, we investigated the efficacy of a new 2D learning medium—the self-paced slideshow. A primary goal was to determine whether the “video deficit effect” extended to self-paced slideshows. In Experiment 1, preschool-age children saw demonstrations of novel events either live, on video, or by advancing through self-paced slideshows. They were then tested on their performance and verbal memory. In line with past work, children in the live condition outperformed those in the video and slideshow conditions at reproducing the target actions. To further explore the 2D media, Experiment 2 directly compared learning from self-paced slideshows to that from videos. Changes to the stimuli included a more natural extraction rate of slides and a higher focus on the objects. Children’s performance differed little between conditions, with the exception of reproducing fewer actions in the slideshow than video condition on two (of four) toys. Ultimately, we conclude that the video deficit extends to self-paced slideshows. Future work must investigate how to enhance children’s learning from 2D sources, given their increasing role in daily life.
Tools allow one to overcome the limits of one's body in interacting with the environment. After learning to control their hands to grasp objects, babies gradually discover that one object can be used to act on other objects. In this article we shall discuss specifically the use of those tools that allow far-off objects to be brought into range. We shall first describe studies of behaviours that are precursors to this skill, in particular means-end behaviours that require invoking an intermediate means to attain a final end. We shall then describe the existing studies of the use of a tool to bring an object closer. In the second part of the article we ask what the mechanisms are that might underlie the discovery of this kind of tool use. We shall appeal to results of a study in which we followed four infants starting at age 12 months for about a year, and in which they had to attain an out-of-reach toy with a rake. Our results show that the infants needed several months before understanding the use of the rake. During this period they explored the rake, begged for the toy, played with toy and rake together but without trying to bring the toy closer. Only around age 18 months did the infants, somewhat suddenly, come to understand that the rake could be used to attain the toy. We conclude that in order to be helpful, trial and error, as well as observational learning, require the child to have a degree of intuition concerning the solution. This intuition itself requires a long period of exploration which may contribute both to improving the child's ability to manipulate the rake (perhaps becoming an extension of the hand) and to improving the child's knowledge of the rake's affordances.
It seems self-evident that human responsiveness to social input enhances learning, yet the details of the social forces at play are only beginning to come into focus. Recent research on language and cognitive development in preschoolers and infants illuminates mechanisms such as social gating and natural pedagogy, and specific ways in which they benefit learning. We review such advances and consider implications of this research for designing robotic systems that can harness the power of social forces for learning.
In recent years there has been a shift within developmental psychology away from examining the cognitive systems at different ages, to trying to understand exactly what are the mechanisms that generate change. What kind of learning mechanisms and representational changes drive cognitive development? How can the imaging techniques available help us to understand these mechanisms? This new volume in the highy cited and critically acclaimed Attention and Performance series is the first to provide a systematic investigation into the processes of change in mental development. It brings together world class scientists to address brain and cognitive development at several different levels, including phylogeny, genetics, neurophysiology, brain imaging, behavior, and computational modeling, across both typically and atypically developing populations. Presenting original new research from the frontiers of cognitive neuroscience, this book will have a substantial impact in this field, as well as on developmental psychology and developmental neuroscience.
Thirty-six 2-, 4-, and 6-month-old infants were videotaped while interacting with a female adult stranger engaging in either organized or disorganized 1-min peekaboo games. Two-month-old infants gazed and smiled equally at the stranger, regardless of the relative organization of the peekaboo game. In contrast, 4- and 6-month-old infants smiled significantly more and gazed significantly less in the organized peekaboo condition than in the disorganized peekaboo condition. These results suggest that from a diffuse sensitivity to the presence of a social partner, infants by 4 months develop a new sensitivity to the narrative envelope of protoconversation, in particular the timing and the structure of social exchanges scaffolded by adults. These observations are interpreted as evidence of developing social expectations in the first 6 months of life. This early development is viewed as announcing and preparing the communicative competence that blossoms by the end of the 1st year.
Two experiments investigated how 3-year-old children select a tool to perform a manual task, with a focus on their perseverative parameter choices for the various relationships involved in handling a tool: the actor-to-tool relation and the tool-to-target relation (topology). The first study concerned the parameter value for the tool-to-target relation by asking how children use a cane for either pushing an object further away (exclosure; outside the hook) or pulling an object nearby (enclosure; inside the hook). The second study concerned the parameter value for the hand-to-tool relation by assessing the hand used for grasping a spoon to feed a puppet. Results from both studies showed that on the first trial, choices were driven by task information. However, when the task switched from pulling to pushing or from left hand to right hand, or vice versa, children persevered with the choice they made during the 4 previous trials. Results are discussed in terms of the dynamical field modeling work of Esther Thelen and her colleagues. Our findings underscore Thelen's hypotheses that: (a) the action-selection process is a dynamic affair, affected by multiple influences at different time scales and its own intrinsic dynamics; and (b) that perseverative behavior is a general phenomenon that is neither indicative for a specific period in the development, nor for a particular task. Similarly, we argue that the presence (or absence) of causal understanding emerges from the action-selection process, rather than determining this process.
Investigated whether children would re-enact what an adult actually did or what the adult intended to do. In Experiment, 1 children were shown an adult who tried, but failed, to perform certain target acts. Completed target acts were thus not observed. Children in comparison groups either saw the full target act or appropriate controls. Results showed that children could infer the adult's intended act by watching the failed attempts. Experiment 2 tested children's understanding of an inanimate object that traced the same movements as the person had followed. Children showed a completely different reaction to the mechanical device than to the person: They did not produce the target acts in this case. Eighteen-mo-olds situate people within a psychological framework that differentiates between the surface behavior of people and a deeper level involving goals and intentions. They have already adopted a fundamental aspect of folk psychology—persons (but not inanimate objects) are understood within a framework involving goals and intentions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
We investigated the possibility that mothers modify their infant-directed actions in ways that might assist infants’ processing of human action. In a between-subjects design, 51 mothers demonstrated the properties of five novel objects either to their infant (age 6–8 months or 11–13 months) or to an adult partner. As predicted, demonstrations to infants were higher in interactiveness, enthusiasm, proximity to partner, range of motion, repetitiveness and simplicity, indicating that mothers indeed modify their infant-directed actions in ways that likely maintain infants’ attention and highlight the structure and meaning of action. The findings demonstrate that ‘motherese’ is broader in scope than previously recognized, including modifications to action as well as language.
In this study, we investigated relations between infants' understanding of intentional actions and measures of social responsiveness during a transitional period, 9-to 11-months. Infants (N = 52) were tested in visual habituation paradigms tapping their understanding of the relation between a person and the object of her attention. Mea-sures of social responsiveness included orienting to the target of another's attention, point production, and supported joint attention in parent–child play. Infants' re-sponses to the habituation events were related to their social responsiveness. Distinct factors for understanding actions and social responsiveness as relational were re-vealed. Infants who produced object-directed points were more likely to understand pointing as relational, and infants who engaged in high amounts of shared attention were more likely to understand gaze. Infants' tendency to orient in response to an adult's gaze shifts and points was unrelated to their understanding of gaze and point-ing. These findings elucidate the ways in which social cognition and social respon-siveness, although distinct, are related in development. Between 9 and 12 months of age, infants begin to participate in increasingly rich triadic interactions. During this period, the shift in complexity of infants' social behavior is so dramatic that Tomasello (1995) dubbed it the "social-cognitive revo-lution". This term implies that changes in infants' social responsiveness are accompanied by changes in their understanding of others' actions. Although this assumption provides the foundation for many theories of social-cognitive develop-ment, until now it has not been empirically tested.
We propose that humans are adapted to transfer knowledge to, and receive knowledge from, conspecifics by teaching. This adaptation, which we call 'pedagogy', involves the emergence of a special communication system that does not presuppose either language or high-level theory of mind, but could itself provide a basis facilitating the development of these human-specific abilities both in phylogenetic and ontogenetic terms. We speculate that tool manufacturing and mediated tool use made the evolution of such a new social learning mechanism necessary. However, the main body of evidence supporting this hypothesis comes from developmental psychology. We argue that many central phenomena of human infant social cognition that may seem puzzling in the light of their standard functional explanation can be more coherently and plausibly interpreted as reflecting the adaptations to receive knowledge from social partners through teaching.
Having repeatedly retrieved an object from a location, human infants tend to search the same place even when they observe the object being hidden at another location. This perseverative error is usually explained by infants' inability to inhibit a previously rewarded search response or to recall the new location. We show that the tendency to commit this error is substantially reduced (from 81 to 41%) when the object is hidden in front of 10-month-old infants without the experimenter using the communicative cues that normally accompany object hiding in this task. We suggest that this improvement is due to an interpretive bias that normally helps infants learn from demonstrations but misleads them in the context of a hiding game. Our finding provides an alternative theoretical perspective on the nature of infants' perseverative search errors.
Prior work suggests that active experience affects infants' understanding of simple actions. The present studies compared the impact of active and observational experience on infants' ability to identify the goal of a novel tool-use event. Infants either received active training and practice in using a cane to retrieve an out-of-reach toy or had matched observational experience before taking part in a habituation paradigm that we used to assess infants' ability to identify the goal of another person's tool-use acts. Active training alone facilitated 10-month-old infants' ability to identify the goal of the tool-use event. Active experience using tools may enable infants to build motor representations of tool-use events that subsequently guide action perception and support action understanding.
Previous research reveals that novel words highlight object categories for preschoolers and infants as young as 12 months. Three experiments extend these findings to 9-month-olds. Infants were familiarized to slides of animals (e.g., rabbits). Infants in the Word condition heard infant-directed word phrases ("a rabbit") and infants in the Tone condition heard tones. During familiarization, infants' visual fixation was enhanced on trials with sounds (either words or tones), relative to silent trials. On test trials, a new exemplar from the familiar category (e.g., rabbit) was paired with a novel animal (e.g., pig). Infants in the Word condition showed greater attention to novelty than those in the Tone condition. A third group of infants who heard content-filtered words responded similarly to infants in the Word condition. Implications of the facilitative effects of words and content-filtered words on object categorization are discussed within a framework describing infants' emerging appreciation of language over the first year of life.
PET was used to map brain regions that are associated with the observation of meaningful and meaningless hand actions. Subjects were scanned under four conditions which consisted of visually presented actions. In each of the four experimental conditions, they were instructed to watch the actions with one of two aims: to be able to recognize or to imitate them later. We found that differences in the meaning of the action, irrespective of the strategy used during observation, lead to different patterns of brain activity and clear left/right asymmetries. Meaningful actions strongly engaged the left hemisphere in frontal and temporal regions while meaningless actions involved mainly the right occipitoparietal pathway. Observing with the intent to recognize activated memory-encoding structures. In contrast, observation with the intent to imitate was associated with activation in the regions involved in the planning and in the generation of actions. Thus, the pattern of brain activation during observation of actions is dependent both on the nature of the required executive processing and the type of the extrinsic properties of the action presented.
Three longitudinal studies are reported in which 6-8-month-old infants were tested on means-end problems involving pulling a cloth to retrieve a toy. Production of intentional means-end behavior increased between 6 and 7 months, but although 6-month-olds' behavior was unaffected by the presence or absence of a toy on the cloth, 7-month-olds more often produced means-end sequences when a toy could be retrieved. Infants' performance remained the same when the cloth was either attached to the toy or separate, suggesting that goal-subgoal conflict does not interfere with performance of means-end sequences. By 8 months, infants could appropriately adjust their means-end behavior to the distance of the toy. These results confirm J. Piaget's (1953) original description of a shift from transitional to intentional means-end behavior and suggest that development of means-end behavior involves acquisition of knowledge of appropriate means-end relations.
Humans have an inherent tendency to infer other people's intentions from their actions. Here we review psychophysical and functional neuroimaging evidence that biological motion is processed as a special category, from which we automatically infer mental states such as intention. The mechanism underlying the attribution of intentions to actions might rely on simulating the observed action and mapping it onto representations of our own intentions. There is accumulating neurophysiological evidence to support a role for action simulation in the brain.
Infants acquire language with remarkable speed, although little is known about the mechanisms that underlie the acquisition process. Studies of the phonetic units of language have shown that early in life, infants are capable of discerning differences among the phonetic units of all languages, including native- and foreign-language sounds. Between 6 and 12 mo of age, the ability to discriminate foreign-language phonetic units sharply declines. In two studies, we investigate the necessary and sufficient conditions for reversing this decline in foreign-language phonetic perception. In Experiment 1, 9-mo-old American infants were exposed to native Mandarin Chinese speakers in 12 laboratory sessions. A control group also participated in 12 language sessions but heard only English. Subsequent tests of Mandarin speech perception demonstrated that exposure to Mandarin reversed the decline seen in the English control group. In Experiment 2, infants were exposed to the same foreign-language speakers and materials via audiovisual or audio-only recordings. The results demonstrated that exposure to recorded Mandarin, without interpersonal interaction, had no effect. Between 9 and 10 mo of age, infants show phonetic learning from live, but not prerecorded, exposure to a foreign language, suggesting a learning process that does not require long-term listening and is enhanced by social interaction.
Much of learning and reasoning occurs in pedagogical situ- ations - situations in which teachers choose examples with the goal of having a learner infer the concept the teacher has in mind. In this paper, we present a model of teaching and learning in pedagogical settings which predicts what examples teachers should choose and what learners should infer given a teachers' examples. We present two experiments using an experimental paradigm called the rectangle game. The first experiment compares people's inferences to qualitative model predictions. The second experiment tests people in a situation where pedagogical sampling is not appropriate, ruling out al- ternative explanations, and suggesting that people use context- appropriate sampling assumptions. We conclude by discussing connections to broader work in inductive reasoning and cogni- tive development, and outline areas of future work. Much of human learning and reasoning goes on in ped- agogical settings. In schools, teachers impart their knowl- edge to students about mathematics, science, and literature through examples and problems. From early in life, parents teach children words for objects and actions, and cultural and personal preferences through subtle glances and outright ad- monitions. Pedagogical settings - settings where one agent is choosing information to transmit to another agent for the pur-
To carry out his investigations, Bruner went to "the clutter of life at home," the child's own setting for learning, rather than observing children in a "contrived video laboratory." For Bruner, language is learned by using it. An central to its use are what he calls "formats," scriptlike interactions between mother and child in short, play and games. What goes on in games as rudimentary as peekaboo or hide-and-seek can tell us much about language acquisition.But what aids the aspirant speaker in his attempt to use language? To answer this, the author postulates the existence of a Language Acquisition Support System that frames the interactions between adult and child in such a way as to allow the child to proceed from learning how to refer to objects to learning to make a request of another human being. And, according to Bruner, the Language Acquisition Support System not only helps the child learn "how to say it" but also helps him to learn "what is canonical, obligatory, and valued among those to whom he says it." In short, it is a vehicle for the transmission of our culture."
How does explicit instruction affect exploratory play and learning? We present a model that captures pedagogical assumptions (adapted from Shafto and Goodman, 2008) and test the model with a novel experiment looking at 4-year-olds' exploratory play in pedagogical and non-pedagogical contexts. Our findings are consistent with the model predictions: preschool children limit their exploration in pedagogical contexts, spending most of their free play performing only the demonstrated action. By contrast, children explore broadly both at baseline and after an accidental demonstration. Thus pedagogy constrains children's exploration for better and for worse; children learn the demonstrated causal relationship but are less likely than children in non-pedagogical contexts to discover and learn other causal relationships.
Causal learning by children combines both observation and action. These two sources of information have not been well integrated in developmental theory. Following Michotte (1965), some developmental scientists argue that young infants are exquisitely tuned observers, and that their perceptual understanding of causality far outstrips their ability to use this information to manipulate the world. Following Piaget (1954), others argue that young infants learn little by pure observation-self-produced motor action is critical; cognitive development generally, and causal reasoning in particular, is charted as a progressive combination of action schemes. The discussion in the chapter concludes that, starting at birth, there seems to be a delicate interplay between learning by observation and learning by doing. The two views are not quarantined from each other as Michotte (with an emphasis on observation over motor experience) or Piaget (with an emphasis on motor experience over pure perception) might have supposed. Instead, there seems to be a reciprocal exchange between these two modes of learning. What infants observe influences what they do (novel headtouch imitation), and what they can do changes their attention to the model and how they interpret it (tool use from observation). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Describes the theoretical background, development, and use of a novel approach to the assessment of psychological development in infancy. 7 scales developed for assessing separately an infant's progress in various areas of intellectual functioning (e.g., visual pursuit and permanence of objects, gestural imitation, and vocal imitation) are outlined, and the value of viewing an infant's achievements as a coherent sequence of ordered levels is examined. (8 p ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Generalizing knowledge about nonobvious object properties often involves inductive inference. For example, having discovered that a particular object can float, we may infer that other objects of similar appearance likewise float. In this research, exploratory play served as a window on early inductive capability. In the first study, 48 infants between 9 and 16 months explored pairs of novel toys in 2 test conditions: violated expectation (two similar toys were presented in sequence, the first toy produced an interesting nonobvious property, such as a distinctive sound or movement, while the second toy was invisibly altered such that it failed to produce the nonobvious property available in the first toy), and interest control (two similar-looking toys were presented in sequence, neither of which produced the interesting property). Infants quickly and persistently attempted to reproduce the interesting property when exploring the second toy of the violated expectation condition relative to the first toy of the interest control condition (a baseline estimate) or the second toy of the interest control condition (an estimate of simple disinterest). The second study, with 40 9–16-month-olds, confirmed these results and also indicated a degree of discrimination on infants' part: Infants seldom expected toys of radically different appearance to possess the same nonobvious property. The findings indicate that infants as young as 9 months can draw simple inferences about nonobvious object properties after only brief experience with just 1 exemplar.
Infants’ developing causal expectations for the outcome of a simple tool-use event from ages 8 to 12 months were investigated. Causal expectations were studied by comparing infants’ developing tool-use actions (i.e. as tool-use agents) with their developing perceptual reactions (i.e. as tool-use observers) to possible and impossible tool-use events. In Experiment 1, tool-use actions were studied by presenting infants, ages 8 and 12 months, with tool-use object-retrieval problems. In Experiment 2, a second age-matched sample of infants watched a comparable series of possible and impossible tool-use events in which a tool was used to retrieve a goal-object. Two core related findings were made. First, infants’ causal action and causal perception develop in parallel. In both action and perception, supporting tool-use develops before surrounding tool-use. Second, infants’ tool-use action develops before their causal perception of comparable tool-use events. The findings support the constructivist hypothesis that infants’ causal actions may develop before and inform their causal perceptions.
This research examines whether infants actively contribute to the achievement of joint reference. One possibility is that infants tend to link a label with whichever object they are focused on when they hear the label. If so, infants would make a mapping error when an adult labels a different object than the one occupying their focus. Alternatively, infants may be able to use a speaker's nonverbal cues (e.g., line of regard) to interpret the reference of novel labels. This ability would allow infants to avoid errors when adult labels conflict with infants' focus. 64 16–19-month-olds were taught new labels for novel toys in 2 situations. In follow-in labeling, the experimenter looked at and labeled a toy at which infants were already looking. In discrepant labeling, the experimenter looked at and labeled a different toy than the one occupying infants' focus. Infants' responses to subsequent comprehension questions revealed that they (a) successfully learned the labels introduced during follow-in labeling, and (b) displayed no tendency to make mapping errors after discrepant labeling. Thus infants of only 16 to 19 months understand that a speaker's nonverbal cues are relevant to the reference of object labels; they already can contribute to the social coordination involved in achieving joint reference.
Infants as young as 12 months readily modulate their behavior toward novel, ambiguous objects based on emotional responses that others display. Such social-referencing skill offers powerful benefits to infants' knowledge acquisition, but the magnitude of these benefits depends on whether they appreciate the referential quality of others' emotional messages, and are skilled at using cues to reference (e.g., gaze direction, body posture) to guide their interpretation of such messages. Two studies demonstrated referential understanding in 12- and 18-month-olds' responses to another's emotional outburst. Infants relied on the presence versus absence of referential cues to determine whether an emotional message should be linked with a salient, novel object in the first study (N= 48), and they actively consulted referential cues to disambiguate the intended target of an affective display in the second study (N= 32). These findings provide the first experimental evidence of such sophisticated referential abilities in 12-month-olds, as well as the first evidence that infant social referencing at any age actually trades on referential understanding.
In this essay I argue for a new wave of research on tool use development. Advances in the literature on perception–action development hold important clues for how tool use unfolds in children. These advances suggest that tool use may be a more continuous developmental achievement than has been previously believed. On this view, tool use is rooted in the perception–action routines that infants employ to gain information about their environments. Although tools alter the properties of effector systems, children use tools to explore and change their environments, building on efforts that originate in infancy. Based on this approach, new research directions are suggested, including efforts designed to investigate the processes by which children detect and relate affordances between objects, coordinate spatial frames of reference, and incorporate early-appearing action patterns into instrumental behaviors.
Current work has yielded differential findings regarding infants' ability to perceptually detect the causal structure of a means–end support sequence. Resolving this debate has important implications for perception–action dissociations in this domain of object knowledge. In Study 1, 12-month-old infants' ability to perceive the causal structure of a cloth-pulling sequence was assessed via a habituation paradigm. After seeing an event in which a supported toy was moved by pulling a cloth that it sat on, 12-month-old infants demonstrated longer looking to events that violated the causal structure of this sequence than to events that preserved the causal structure but varied other perceptual features of the event. Studies 2 and 3 investigated 10-month-olds' interpretations of means–end support sequences using both a habituation paradigm and a task that assessed infants' own means–end actions. Whereas 10-month-olds failed to demonstrate an understanding of the causal structure when tested using a flat cloth as the support (Study 2), sensitivity to this structure was apparent when a rectangular box was the support. These patterns were evident in both action and perception (Study 3). Moreover, individual variation in action task performance was related to visual habituation performance. The results are discussed with respect to the relation between action and perception in infancy.
In the present study, the discourse interaction between adult and child was examined in terms of the content of their utterances, and the linguistic and contextual relations between their messages, in order to investigate how children use the information from adults' input sentences to form contingent responses. The analyses described were based on longitudinal data from four children from approximately 21 to 36 months of age. Categories of child discourse, their development and their interactions with aspects of prior adult utterances form the major results of the study. Child utterances were identified as adjacent (immediately preceded by an adult utterance), or as nonadjacent (not immediately preceded by an adult utterance). Adjacent utterances were either contingent (shared the same topic and added new information relative to the topic of the prior utterance), imitative (shared the same topic but did not add new information), or noncontingent (did not share the same topic). From the beginning, the adjacent speech was greater than nonadjacent speech. Contingent speech increased over time; in particular, linguistically contingent speech (speech that expanded the verb relation of the prior adult utterance with added or replaced constituents within a clause) showed the greatest developmental increase. Linguistically contingent speech occurred more often after questions than nonquestions. The results are discussed in terms of how the differential requirements for processing information in antecedent messages is related to language learning.
This study explored infants' ability to discriminate between, and their tendency to reproduce, the accidental and intentional actions of others. Twenty 14- through 18-month-olds watched an adult perform a series of two-step actions on objects that made interesting results occur. Some of the modeled actions were marked vocally as intentional (“There!”), some were marked vocally as accidental (“Woops!”). Following each demonstration, infants were given a chance to make the result occur themselves. Overall, infants imitated almost twice as many of the adult's intentional actions as her accidental ones. Infants before age 18 months thus may understand something about the intentions of other persons. This understanding represents infants' first step toward adult-like social cognition and underlies their acquisition of language and other cultural skills.
Numerous studies have indicated that when adults interact with very young children, they modify their speech in a consistent fashion. Although the characteristics of these modifications have been well documented, relatively little is known about the frequency and types of gestures that accompany adults' speech to young children. The present study was designed to provide data on maternal use of gesture during mother-toddler interactions and to assess whether maternal use of gestures changes as children's speech becomes progressively more complex. Twelve upper-middle-class Italian mother-child dyads were videotaped in their homes for 45 min when children were 16 and 20 months of age. Results indicated that mothers made use of a “gestural motherese” characterized by the relatively infrequent use of concrete gestures redundant with and reinforcing the message conveyed in speech. In addition, individual differences in maternal gesture and speech production were highly stable over time despite substantial changes in children's use of gesture and speech, and there was some evidence for positive relations between maternal gesture production and children's verbal and gestural production and vocabulary size within and across observations. Findings are discussed in terms of the functions that maternal gesture may serve for young language learners.
At around 1 year of age, human infants display a number of new behaviors that seem to indicate a newly emerging understanding of other persons as intentional beings whose attention to outside objects may be shared, followed into, and directed in various ways. These behaviors have mostly been studied separately. In the current study, we investigated the most important of these behaviors together as they emerged in a single group of 24 infants between 9 and 15 months of age. At each of seven monthly visits, we measured joint attentional engagement, gaze and point following, imitation of two different kinds of actions on objects, imperative and declarative gestures, and comprehension and production of language. We also measured several nonsocial-cognitive skills as a point of comparison. We report two studies. The focus of the first study was the initial emergence of infants' social-cognitive skills and how these skills are related to one another developmentally. We found a reliable pattern of emergence: Infants progressed from sharing to following to directing others' attention and behavior. The nonsocial skills did not emerge predictably in this developmental sequence. Furthermore, correlational analyses showed that the ages of emergence of all pairs of the social-cognitive skills or their components were interrelated. The focus of the second study was the social interaction of infants and their mothers, especially with regard to their skills of joint attentional engagement (including mothers' use of language to follow into or direct infants' attention) and how these skills related to infants' early communicative competence. Our measures of communicative competence included not only language production, as in previous studies, but also language comprehension and gesture production. It was found that two measures-the amount of time infants spent in joint engagement with their mothers and the degree to which mothers used language that followed into their infant's focus of attention-predicted infants' earliest skills of gestural and linguistic communication. Results of the two studies are discussed in terms of their implications for theories of social-cognitive development, for theories of language development, and for theories of the process by means of which human children become fully participating members of the cultural activities and processes into which they are born.
Four studies were conducted to investigate the relation between audition and vision in the human newborn. In all four studies visual activity was recorded with infrared corneal-reflection technqiues in 1- to 4-day-old infants. Study 1 concerned the effects of sound at midline on scanning in darkness and in a lit but formless field. In the dark compared to light, newborns maintained better eye control, centralized fixations, scanned with smaller eye movements, scanned less dispersely, and were wider-eyed. In a blank field, sound caused newborns to maintain better eye control, centralize fixations, scan with small eye movements, constrain fixations, and be wider-eyed than in silence. Sound had little effect on scanning in the dark beyond constraining fixations. Study 2 concerned the effects of sound at midline on scanning vertical and horizontal edges. Visual activity was different for the two visual stimuli. While viewing a vertical rather than a horizontal edge, newborns maintained better eye control and fixated closer to the position of the vertical edge. Newborns crossed the position of the horizontal edge when that edge was present. Sound affected scanning in general, centralizing fixations for newborns not already looking centrally, but sound did not affect the frequency of edge crossing. Study 3 concerned the effects of laterally presented sound on scanning spatially consonant or dissonant vertical bars. The major finding was that infants were sensitive to the spatial property of sound. Infants shifted fixations first toward and then gradually away from sound. Study 4 was an attempt to determine whether there is an effort constraint on the simultaneous functioning of auditory and visual systems. The effects of two differentially salient sounds on scanning two differentially salient visual stimuli were examined. Although the results appeared to support the idea of an effort constraint, the data were accounted for parsimoniously in terms of the spatial influence of sound of scanning. The data on visual activity were discussed in terms of the presence of inherent information-acquisition routines in the newborn. It was concluded that sound influences visual epistemic behavior even at birth.
The time course and the nature of social elicitation of vocalizations in 3-month-old infants were analyzed. Adult stimulation produced an immediate and significant increase in both the rate and the percent of bursts of vocal sounds of eight infants (Experiment 1). Both response-independent and response-dependent social stimulation were effective in producing increased rates of vocalizations, but only when each of four infants could see the eyes of the adult who delivered the social stimulus (Experiment 2).
This research examines whether infants actively contribute to the achievement of joint reference. One possibility is that infants tend to link a a label with whichever object they are focused on when they hear the label. If so, infants would make a mapping error when an adult labels a different object than the one occupying their focus. Alternatively, infants may be able to use a speaker's nonverbal cues (e.g., line of regard) to interpret the reference of novel labels. This ability would allow infants to avoid errors when adult labels conflict with infants' focus. 64 16-19-month-olds were taught new labels for novel toys in 2 situations. In follow-in labeling, the experimenter looked at and labeled a toy at which infants were already looking. In discrepant labeling, the experimenter looked at and labeled a different toy than the one occupying infants' focus. Infants' responses to subsequent comprehension questions revealed that they (a) successfully learned the labels introduced during follow-in labeling, and (b) displayed no tendency to make mapping errors after discrepant labeling. Thus infants of only 16 to 19 months understand that a speaker's nonverbal cues are relevant to the reference of object labels; they already can contribute to the social coordination involved in achieving joint reference.
This work explores how infants in the early phases of acquiring language come to establish an initial mapping between objects and their labels. If infants are biased to attend more to objects in the presence of language, that could help them to note word-object object pairings. To test this, a first study compared how long 18 10-14-month-old infants looked at unfamiliar toys when labeling phrases accompanied their presentation, versus when no labeling phrases were provided. As predicted, labeling the toys increased infants' attention to them. A second study examined whether the presence of labeling phrases increased infants' attention to objects over and above what pointing, a powerful nonlinguistic method for directing infants' attention, could accomplish on its own. 22 infants from 2 age groups (10-14- and 17-20-month-olds) were shown pairs of unfamiliar toys in 2 situations: (a) in a pointing alone condition, where the experimenter pointed a number of times at one of the toys, and (b) in a labeling + pointing condition, where the experimenter labeled the target toy while pointing to it. While the pointing occurred, infants looked just as long at the target toy whether or not it was labeled. During a subsequent play period in which no labels were uttered, however, infants gazed longer at the target toys that had been labeled than at those that had not. Thus language can increase infants' attention to objects beyond the time that labeling actually occurs. These studies do not pinpoint which aspects of labeling behavior contribute to the attentional facilitation effect that was observed. In any case, however, this tendency for language to sustain infants' attention to objects may help them learn the mappings between words and objects.
Generalizing knowledge about nonobvious object properties often involves inductive inference. For example, having discovered that a particular object can float, we may infer that other objects of similar appearance likewise float. In this research, exploratory play served as a window on early inductive capability. In the first study, 48 infants between 9 and 16 months explored pairs of novel toys in 2 test conditions: violated expectation (two similar toys were presented in sequence, the first toy produced an interesting nonobvious property, such as a distinctive sound or movement, while the second toy was invisibly altered such that it failed to produce the nonobvious property available in the first toy), and interest control (two similar-looking toys were presented in sequence, neither of which produced the interesting property). Infants quickly and persistently attempted to reproduce the interesting property when exploring the second toy of the violated expectation condition relative to the first toy of the interest control condition (a baseline estimate) or the second toy of the interest control condition (an estimate of simple disinterest). The second study, with 40 9-16-months-olds, confirmed these results and also indicated a degree of discrimination on infants' part: Infants seldom expected toys of radically different appearance to possess the same nonobvious property. The findings indicate that infants as young as 9 months can draw simple inferences about nonobvious object properties after only brief experience with just 1 exemplar.
The main thrust of this paper is to question whether in earlier studies the 'motherese hypothesis' has been adequately tested. The present study first explores concurrent relations between maternal and child language at an early age, using the Snyder, Bates & Bretherton (1981) questionnaire to assess vocabulary at 1;1. With a large sample of 45 subjects, videotaped at 1;1 and 1;8, it was possible to analyse earlier talkers separately from later talkers. The results indicate pre-existing differences between the mothers of earlier and later talkers as early as 1;1--some 5 months before other studies have examined the possible facilitative effects of 'motherese'. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, when the sample was divided according to stylistic preference at 1;8, several associations between maternal language at 1;1 and MLU at 1;8 emerged for the non-expressive group which were non-existent for the expressive group. These results imply that earlier studies may have been looking for the effectiveness of maternal input too late. Moreover, it may continue to be difficult to demonstrate consistent effects of child-directed speech as long as researchers continue to ignore individual differences in style of language acquisition.
At around 1 year of age, human infants display a number of new behaviors that seem to indicate a newly emerging understanding of other persons as intentional beings whose attention to outside objects may be shared, followed into, and directed in various ways. These behaviors have mostly been studied separately. In the current study, we investigated the most important of these behaviors together as they emerged in a single group of 24 infants between 9 and 15 months of age. At each of seven monthly visits, we measured joint attentional engagement, gaze and point following, imitation of two different kinds of actions on objects, imperative and declarative gestures, and comprehension and production of language. We also measured several nonsocial-cognitive skills as a point of comparison. We report two studies. The focus of the first study was the initial emergence of infants' social-cognitive skills and how these skills are related to one another developmentally. We found a reliable pattern of emergence: Infants progressed from sharing to following to directing others' attention and behavior. The nonsocial skills did not emerge predictably in this developmental sequence. Furthermore, correlational analyses showed that the ages of emergence of all pairs of the social-cognitive skills or their components were inter-related. The focus of the second study was the social interaction of infants and their mothers, especially with regard to their skills of joint attentional engagement (including mothers' use of language to follow into or direct infants' attention) and how these skills related to infants' early communicative competence. Our measures of communicative competence included not only language production, as in previous studies, but also language comprehension and gesture production. It was found that two measures--the amount of time infants spent in joint engagement with their mothers and the degree to which mothers used language that followed into their infant's focus of attention--predicted infants' earliest skills of gestural and linguistic communication. Results of the two studies are discussed in terms of their implications for theories of social-cognitive development, for theories of language development, and for theories of the process by means of which human children become fully participating members of the cultural activities and processes into which they are born.
In this essay I argue for a new wave of research on tool use development. Advances in the literature on perception-action development hold important clues for how tool use unfolds in children. These advances suggest that tool use may be a more continuous developmental achievement than has been previously believed. On this view, tool use is rooted in the perception-action routines that infants employ to gain information about their environments. Although tools alter the properties of effector systems, children use tools to explore and change their environments, building on efforts that originate in infancy. Based on this approach, new research directions are suggested, including efforts designed to investigate the processes by which children detect and relate affordances between objects, coordinate spatial frames of reference, and incorporate early-appearing action patterns into instrumental behaviors.
Despite considerable debate about whether nonhuman primates learn to use tools via imitation, this type of learning by children has received surprisingly little attention. The findings of two studies that go some way toward filling this gap are reported here. Study 1 showed that when 2- and 3-year-old children (N = 68) were shown a correct solution to a tool-using task (which they could not solve spontaneously), all the children in both age groups managed at least a partial solution. When children were shown an incorrect solution followed by a correct solution, 2-year-olds again produced only a partial solution. By contrast, most 3-year-olds produced a full solution. Study 2 replicated this age change in a separate sample of children (N = 100) with a different tool-using task. Study 2 also showed that 3-year-olds benefit from observing an incorrect action when it can be contrasted with a correct action: they chose the more effective of the two actions. Taken together, the two studies indicate that by 3 years of age, children do not indiscriminately imitate actions on a tool, but selectively reproduce those actions that have a desired causal effect.
Research suggests that by the age of five, children have extensive causal knowledge, in the form of intuitive theories. The crucial question for developmental cognitive science is how young children are able to learn causal structure from evidence. Recently, researchers in computer science and statistics have developed representations (causal Bayes nets) and learning algorithms to infer causal structure from evidence. Here we explore evidence suggesting that infants and children have the prerequisites for making causal inferences consistent with causal Bayes net learning algorithms. Specifically, we look at infants and children's ability to learn from evidence in the form of conditional probabilities, interventions and combinations of the two.
Humans are adapted to spontaneously transfer relevant cultural knowledge to conspecifics and to fast-learn the contents of such teaching through a human-specific social learning system called 'pedagogy' (Csibra & Gergely, 2006). Pedagogical knowledge transfer is triggered by specific communicative cues (such as eye-contact, contingent reactivity, the prosodic pattern of 'motherese', and being addressed by one's own name). Infants show special sensitivity to such 'ostensive' cues that signal the teacher's communicative intention to manifest new and relevant knowledge about a referent object. Pedagogy offers a novel functional perspective to interpret a variety of early emerging triadic communicative interactions between adults and infants about novel objects they are jointly attending to. The currently dominant interpretation of such triadic communications (mindreading) holds that infants interpret others' object-directed manifestations in terms of subjective mental states (such as emotions, dispositions, or intentions) that they attribute to the other person's mind. We contrast the pedagogical versus the mindreading account in a new study testing 14-month-olds' interpretation of others' object-directed emotion expressions observed in a communicative cueing context. We end by discussing the far-reaching implications of the pedagogical perspective for a wide range of early social-cognitive competences, and for providing new directions for future research on child development.
I advance the hypothesis that the earliest phases of language acquisition -- the developmental transition from an initial universal state of language processing to one that is language-specific -- requires social interaction. Relating human language learning to a broader set of neurobiological cases of communicative development, I argue that the social brain 'gates' the computational mechanisms involved in human language learning.
The relation between audition and vision in the human newborn. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 41 Serial No. 167. Effects of Social Cues on Infant Tool-use 843
- M J Mendelsohn
- M M Haith
Mendelsohn, M. J., & Haith, M. M. (1976). The relation between audition and vision in the human newborn. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 41 Serial No. 167. Effects of Social Cues on Infant Tool-use 843 © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2011 Social Development, 20, 4, 2011