Kelsey Lucca’s research while affiliated with Arizona State University and other places

Evaluating whether someone's behavior is praiseworthy or blameworthy is a fundamental human trait. A seminal study by Hamlin and colleagues in 2007 suggested that the ability to form social evaluations based on third-party interactions emerges within the first year of life: infants preferred a character who helped, over hindered, another who tried but failed to climb a hill. This sparked a new line of inquiry into the origins of social evaluations; however, replication attempts have yielded mixed results. We present a preregistered, multi-laboratory, standardized study aimed at replicating infants’ preference for Helpers over Hinderers. We intended to (1) provide a precise estimate of the effect size of infants’ preference for Helpers over Hinderers, and (2) determine the degree to which preferences are based on social information. Using the ManyBabies framework for big team-based science, we tested 1018 infants (567 included, 5.5–10.5 months) from 37 labs across five continents. Overall, 49.34% of infants preferred Helpers over Hinderers in the social condition, and 55.85% preferred characters who pushed up, versus down, an inanimate object in the nonsocial condition; neither proportion differed from chance or from each other. This study provides evidence against infants’ prosocial preferences in the hill paradigm, suggesting the effect size is weaker, absent, and/or develops later than previously estimated. As the first of its kind, this study serves as a proof-of-concept for using active behavioral measures (e.g., manual choice) in large-scale, multi-lab projects studying infants.

Ivancovsky et al.'s Novelty-Seeking Model suggests several mechanisms that might underlie developmental change in creativity and curiosity. We discuss how these implications both do and do not align with extant developmental findings, suggest two further elements that can provide a more complete developmental account, and discuss current methodological barriers to formulating an integrated developmental model of curiosity and creativity.

Adults have a vertical attention bias (VAB) that directs their focus toward object tops and scene bottoms. This is consistent with focusing attention on the informative aspects and affordances of the environment, and generally favoring a downward gaze. The smaller size of children, combined with their relatively limited interactions with objects and scenes, could lead them to have diminished bias that only gradually develops. Alternatively, an early coupling of attention to action space could lead to VAB similar to adults. The current study investigates the developmental timeline of VAB, comparing 4-7-year-olds to adults. Participants (N = 50 children, 53 adults; 58% White, 22% Asian, 6% Black, 2% Native American, and 12% other) observed naturalistic photographic triptychs (48 objects, 52 scenes, all online). They made similarity judgments comparing a test figure to two flanking figures containing either the same top or same bottom. We found that (a) children and adults exhibit a common VAB for object tops and scene bottoms and (b) the adult bias is stronger than children's. Exploratory analyses revealed the same age trend within children, with VAB increasing with age, and asymptoting at the adult level at age 8. This demonstrates that despite age and body size differences that could make the environment for young children relatively disparate from adults, their perceptual system is already largely attuned to their individual interactive action space, with only minor continuing residual development. The findings support that, like adults, young children focus their attention on their action space and body level affordances, where they interact more with tops of objects and bottoms of scenes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Infancy researchers have often drawn rich conclusions about early capacities to understand abstract concepts like "causality" or "prosociality" from infants' responses to highly simplified and artificial stimuli, leading to questions about the validity of studies utilizing these methods. Indeed, do these stimuli effectively illustrate abstract concepts to infant participants? And if they do, why not assess infants’ cognitive capacities using ecologically valid stimuli of the sort that infants encounter in their everyday lives? Here, using examples from infant cognitive and social developmental research, we make explicit the underlying logic of using simplified stimuli in studies with infant populations by discussing the tradeoff infancy researchers are forced to make between measurement validity and ecological validity. Though we agree that concerns about the validity of simplified stimuli that emerge from this trade-off are founded, we argue that results from these studies should not be dismissed purely on ecological grounds. Rather, we present guidelines for productively challenging the validity of infant research in ways that further our understanding of infant cognition.