Deferred imitation in 9- and 14-month-old infants: A longitudinal study of a Swedish sample

This study investigated deferred imitation using a longitudinal design. A total of 62 Swedish children (32 girls) were tested at both 9 and 14 months of age. The memory delay interval was 10 minutes at 9 months and five minutes at 14 months of age. At both ages children in the imitation group displayed significantly more target actions after modelling than the children in the control group, thus replicating earlier reports of imitation from memory. It was found that individual children with a tendency to perform low deferred imitation at 9 months of age tended to remain low on the test at 14 months, thus raising the possibility of stable individual differences in imitation. This study provides a first investigation of deferred imitation longitudinally among young children, and supports recent theoretical claims that deferred imitation arises earlier in ontogeny than was hypothesized by classical theory. It was observed that there are cultural differences in the way that Swedish versus American adult-infant pairs act in the test situation and ideas are offered regarding the roots of such differences.

Own and Others' Prior Experiences Influence Children's Imitation of Causal Acts

Young children learn from others' examples, and they do so selectively. We examine whether the efficacy of prior experiences influences children's imitation. Thirty-six-month-olds had initial experience on a causal learning task either by performing the task themselves or by watching an adult perform it. The nature of the experience was manipulated such that the actor had either an easy or a difficult experience completing the task. Next, a second adult demonstrated an innovative technique for completing it. Children who had a difficult first-person experience, and those who had witnessed another person having difficulty, were significantly more likely to adopt and imitate the adult's innovation than those who had or witnessed an easy experience. Children who observed another were also more likely to imitate than were those who had the initial experience themselves. Imitation is influenced by prior experience, both when it is obtained through one's own hands-on motor manipulation and when it derives from observing the acts of others.

Neural correlates of action observation and execution in 14-month-old infants: an event-related EEG desynchronization study

There is increasing interest in neurobiological methods for investigating the shared representation of action perception and production in early development. We explored the extent and regional specificity of EEG desynchronization in the infant alpha frequency range (6-9 Hz) during action observation and execution in 14-month-old infants. Desynchronization during execution was restricted to central electrode sites, while action observation was associated with a broader desynchronization across frontal, central, and parietal regions. The finding of regional specificity in the overlap between EEG responses to action execution and observation suggests that the rhythm seen in the 6-9 Hz range over central sites in infancy shares certain properties with the adult mu rhythm. The magnitude of EEG desynchronization to action perception and production appears to be smaller for infants than for adults and older children, suggesting developmental change in this measure.

Hindsight bias from 3 to 95 years of age

Upon learning the outcome to a problem, people tend to believe that they knew it all along (hindsight bias). Here, we report the first study to trace the development of hindsight bias across the life span. One hundred ninety-four participants aged 3 to 95 years completed 3 tasks designed to measure visual and verbal hindsight bias. All age groups demonstrated hindsight bias on all 3 tasks; however, preschoolers and older adults exhibited more bias than older children and younger adults. Multinomial processing tree analyses of these data revealed that preschoolers' enhanced hindsight bias resulted from them substituting the correct answer for their original answer in their recall (a qualitative error). Conversely, older adults' enhanced hindsight bias resulted from them forgetting their original answer and recalling an answer closer to, but not equal to, the correct answer (a quantitative error). We discuss these findings in relation to mechanisms of memory, perspective taking, theory of mind, and executive function.

New findings on object permanence: A developmental difference between two types of occlusion

Manual search for totally occluded objects was investigated in 10-, 12- and 14-month-old infants. Infants responded to two types of total hiding in different ways, supporting the inference that object permanence is not a once-and-for-all attainment. Occlusion of an object by movement of a screen over it was solved at an earlier age than occlusion in which an object was carried under the screen. This dissociation was not explained by motivation, motor skill or means-ends coordination, because for both tasks the same object was hidden in the same place under the same screen and required the same uncovering response. This dissociation generalized across an experimentally manipulated change in recovery means-infants removed cloths while seated at a table in Expt 1 and were required to crawl through 3-D space to displace semi-rigid pillows in Expt 2. Further analysis revealed that emotional response varied as a function of hiding, suggesting an affective correlate of infant cognition. There are four empirical findings to account for: developmental change, task dissociation, generalization of the effects across recovery means, and emotional reactions. An identity-development theory is proposed explaining these findings in terms of infants' understanding of object identity and the developmental relationship between object identity and object permanence. Object identity is seen as a necessary precursor to the development of object permanence.

"Social" robots are psychological agents for infants: a test of gaze following

Gaze following is a key component of human social cognition. Gaze following directs attention to areas of high information value and accelerates social, causal, and cultural learning. An issue for both robotic and infant learning is whose gaze to follow. The hypothesis tested in this study is that infants use information derived from an entity's interactions with other agents as evidence about whether that entity is a perceiver. A robot was programmed so that it could engage in communicative, imitative exchanges with an adult experimenter. Infants who saw the robot act in this social-communicative fashion were more likely to follow its line of regard than those without such experience. Infants use prior experience with the robot's interactions as evidence that the robot is a psychological agent that can see. Infants want to look at what the robot is seeing, and thus shift their visual attention to the external target.

Parenting and temperament prior to September 11, 2001, and parenting specific to 9/11 as predictors of children's posttraumatic stress symptoms following 9/11

Parenting is related to children's adjustment, but little research has examined the role of parenting in children's responses to disasters. This study describes parenting responses specific to the 9/11 terrorist attacks and examines pre-9/11 parenting, child temperament, and 9/11-specific parenting as predictors of children's posttraumatic stress (PTS) symptoms among children geographically distant from the attack locations. A community sample of children and parents (n = 137, ages 9-13 years) participating in an ongoing study were interviewed 1 month following 9/11. Parents reported engaging in a number of parenting responses following 9/11. Pre-9/11 acceptance and 9/11-specific, self-focused parental responses predicted PTS symptoms. Pre-9/11 parenting and temperament interacted to predict PTS symptoms, suggesting that parenting and temperament are important prospective predictors of children's responses to indirect exposure to disasters.

Self discovery enables robot social cognition: are you my teacher?

Infants exploit the perception that others are 'like me' to bootstrap social cognition (Meltzoff, 2007a). This paper demonstrates how the above theory can be instantiated in a social robot that uses itself as a model to recognize structural similarities with other robots; this thereby enables the student to distinguish between appropriate and inappropriate teachers. This is accomplished by the student robot first performing self-discovery, a phase in which it uses actuation-perception relationships to infer its own structure. Second, the student models a candidate teacher using a vision-based active learning approach to create an approximate physical simulation of the teacher. Third, the student determines that the teacher is structurally similar (but not necessarily visually similar) to itself if it can find a neural controller that allows its self model (created in the first phase) to reproduce the perceived motion of the teacher model (created in the second phase). Fourth, the student uses the neural controller (created in the third phase) to move, resulting in imitation of the teacher. Results with a physical student robot and two physical robot teachers demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach. The generalizability of the proposed model allows it to be used over variations in the demonstrator: The student robot would still be able to imitate teachers of different sizes and at different distances from itself, as well as different positions in its field of view, because change in the interrelations of the teacher's body parts are used for imitation, rather than absolute geometric properties.

Learning the rules: observation and imitation of a sorting strategy by 36-month-old children

Two experiments were used to investigate the scope of imitation by testing whether 36-month-olds can learn to produce a categorization strategy through observation. After witnessing an adult sort a set of objects by a visible property (their color; Experiment 1) or a nonvisible property (the particular sounds produced when the objects were shaken; Experiment 2), children showed significantly more sorting by those dimensions relative to children in control groups, including a control in which children saw the sorted endstate but not the intentional sorting demonstration. The results show that 36-month-olds can do more than imitate the literal behaviors they see; they also abstract and imitate rules that they see another person use.

How Do We Empathize with Someone Who Is Not Like Us? A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study

Previous research on the neural underpinnings of empathy has been limited to affective situations experienced in a similar way by an observer and a target individual. In daily life we also interact with people whose responses to affective stimuli can be very different from our own. How do we understand the affective states of these individuals? We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to assess how participants empathize with the feelings of patients who reacted with no pain to surgical procedures but with pain to a soft touch. Empathy for pain of these patients activated the same areas (insula, medial/anterior cingulate cortex) as empathy for persons who responded to painful stimuli in the same way as the observer. Empathy in a situation that was aversive only for the observer but neutral for the patient recruited areas involved in self–other distinction (dorsomedial prefrontal cortex) and cognitive control (right inferior frontal cortex). In addition, effective connectivity between the latter and areas implicated in affective processing was enhanced. This suggests that inferring the affective state of someone who is not like us can rely upon the same neural structures as empathy for someone who is similar to us. When strong emotional response tendencies exist though, these tendencies have to be overcome by executive functions. Our results demonstrate that the fronto-cortical attention network is crucially involved in this process, corroborating that empathy is a flexible phenomenon which involves both automatic and controlled cognitive mechanisms. Our findings have important implications for the understanding and promotion of empathy, demonstrating that regulation of one's egocentric perspective is crucial for understanding others.

Just do it? Investigating the gap between prediction and action in toddlers' causal inferences

Adults' causal representations integrate information about predictive relations and the possibility of effective intervention; if one event reliably predicts another, adults can represent the possibility that acting to bring about the first event might generate the second. Here we show that although toddlers (mean age: 24 months) readily learn predictive relationships between physically connected events, they do not spontaneously initiate one event to try to generate the second (although older children, mean age: 47 months, do; Experiments 1 and 2). Toddlers succeed only when the events are initiated by a dispositional agent (Experiment 3), when the events involve direct contact between objects (Experiment 4), or when the events are described using causal language (Experiment 5). This suggests that causal language may help children extend their initial causal representations beyond agent-initiated and direct contact events.

Neural correlates of belief- and desire-reasoning

Theory of mind requires an understanding of both desires and beliefs. Moreover, children understand desires before beliefs. Little is known about the mechanisms underlying this developmental lag. Additionally, previous neuroimaging and neurophysiological studies have neglected the direct comparison of these developmentally critical mental-state concepts. Event-related brain potentials were recorded as participants (N = 24; mean age = 22 years) reasoned about diverse-desires, diverse-beliefs, and parallel physical situations. A mid-frontal late slow wave (LSW) was associated with desire and belief judgments. A right-posterior LSW was only associated with belief judgments. These findings demonstrate neural overlap and critical differences in reasoning explicitly about desires and beliefs, and they suggest children recruit additional neural processes for belief judgments beyond a common, more general, mentalizing neural system.

Foundations for a new science of learning

Human learning is distinguished by the range and complexity of skills that can be learned and the degree of abstraction that can be achieved compared with those of other species. Homo sapiens is also the only species that has developed formal ways to enhance learning: teachers, schools, and curricula. Human infants have an intense interest in people and their behavior and possess powerful implicit learning mechanisms that are affected by social interaction. Neuroscientists are beginning to understand the brain mechanisms underlying learning and how shared brain systems for perception and action support social learning. Machine learning algorithms are being developed that allow robots and computers to learn autonomously. New insights from many different fields are converging to create a new science of learning that may transform educational practices.

Infant imitation from television using novel touch screen technology

Infants learn less from a televised demonstration than from a live demonstration, the video deficit effect. The present study employs a novel approach, using touch screen technology to examine 15-month olds' transfer of learning. Infants were randomly assigned either to within-dimension (2D/2D or 3D/3D) or cross-dimension (3D/2D or 2D/3D) conditions. For the within-dimension conditions, an experimenter demonstrated an action by pushing avirtual button on a 2D screen or a real button on a 3D object. Infants were then given the opportunity to imitate using the same screen or object. For the 3D/2D condition, an experimenter demonstrated the action on the 3D object, and infants were given the opportunity to reproduce the action on a 2D touch screen (and vice versa for the 2D/3D condition). Infants produced significantly fewer target actions in the cross-dimension conditions than in the within-dimension conditions. These findings have important implications for infants' understanding and learning from 2D images and for their using 2D media as the basis of actions in the real world.

Self-experience as a mechanism for learning about others: a training study in social cognition

Using a gaze-following task, the authors assessed whether self-experience with the view-obstructing properties of blindfolds influenced infants' understanding of this effect in others. In Experiment 1, 12-month-olds provided with blindfold self-experience behaved as though they understood that a person wearing a blindfold cannot see. When a blindfolded adult turned to face an object, these infants gaze followed significantly less than control infants who had either (a) seen and felt the blindfold but whose view had not been obstructed by it or (b) experienced a windowed blindfold through which they could see. In Experiment 2, 18-month-olds experienced either (a) a trick blindfold that looked opaque but could be seen through, (b) an opaque blindfold, or (c) baseline familiarization. Infants receiving trick-blindfold experience now followed a blindfolded adult's gaze significantly more than controls. The authors propose 3 mechanisms underlying infants' capacity to use self-experience as a framework for understanding the visual perception of others.

Infants' understanding of the link between visual perception and emotion: "If she can't see me doing it, she won't get angry."

Two experiments investigated 18-month-olds' understanding of the link between visual perception and emotion. Infants watched an adult perform actions on objects. An emoter then expressed neutral affect or anger toward the adult in response to the adult's actions. Subsequently, infants were given 20 s to interact with each object. In Experiment 1, the emoter faced infants with a neutral expression during each 20-s response period but looked at either a magazine or the infant. In Experiment 2, the emoter faced infants with a neutral expression, and her eyes were either open or closed. When the emoter visually monitored infants' actions, the infants regulated their object-directed behavior on the basis of their memory of the emoter's affect. However, if the previously angry emoter read a magazine (Experiment 1) or closed her eyes (Experiment 2), infants were not governed by her prior emotion. Infants behaved as if they expected the emoter to get angry only if she could see them performing the actions. These findings suggest that infants appreciate how people's visual experiences influence their emotions and use this information to regulate their own behavior.