Fourteen-month-olds selectively search for and use information depending on the familiarity of the informant in both laboratory and home contexts

Do preschoolers trust a competent robot pointer?

How young children learn from different informants has been widely studied. However, most studies investigate how children learn verbally conveyed information. Furthermore, most studies investigate how children learn from humans. This study sought to investigate how 3-year-old children learn from, and come to trust, a competent robot versus an incompetent human when competency is established using a pointing paradigm. During an induction phase, a robot informant pointed at a toy inside a transparent box, whereas a human pointed at an empty box. During the test phase, both agents pointed at opaque boxes. We found that young children asked the robot for help to locate a hidden toy more than the human (ask questions) and correctly identified the robot to be accurate (judgment questions). However, children equally endorsed the locations pointed at by both the robot and the human (endorse questions). This suggests that 3-year-olds are sensitive to the epistemic characteristics of the informant even when its displayed social properties are minimal.

Determining the Function of Social Referencing: The Role of Familiarity and Situational Threat

In ambiguous situations, infants have the tendency to gather information from a social interaction partner to regulate their behavior [social referencing (SR)]. There are two main competing theories concerning SR’s function. According to social-cognitive information-seeking accounts, infants look at social interaction partners to gain information about the ambiguous situation. According to co-regulation accounts, infants look at social interaction partners to receive emotional support. This review provides an overview of the central developments in SR literature in the past years. We focus on the role of situational aspects such as familiarity of SR partners and situational threat, not only for SR (looking), but also for subsequent behavioral regulation (exploration, affect). As the competing accounts make different predictions concerning both contextual factors, this approach may reveal novel insights into the function of SR. Findings showed that a higher familiarity of SR partners consistently resulted in decreased looking (cf. social-cognitive accounts) and that higher threat remains largely understudied, but seemed to increase looking in the first few studies (cf. co-regulation accounts). Concerning behavioral regulation (exploration, affect) findings are mixed. We point out that moving toward a more complex situatedness may help to disentangle the heterogeneous results by considering the interaction between familiarity and threat rather than investigating the factors in isolation. From a general perspective, this review underlines the importance of situational factors and their interaction in eliciting a phenomenon, such as SR, but also in determining the nature of the phenomenon itself.

Do Preverbal Infants Understand Discrete Facial Expressions of Emotion?

An ongoing debate in affective science concerns whether certain discrete, “basic” emotions have evolutionarily based signals (facial expressions) that are easily, universally, and (perhaps) innately identified. Studies with preverbal infants (younger than 24 months) have the potential to shed light on this debate. This review summarizes what is known about preverbal infants’ understanding of discrete emotional facial expressions. Overall, while many studies suggest that preverbal infants differentiate positive and negative facial expressions, few studies have tested whether infants understand discrete emotions (e.g., anger vs. disgust). Moreover, results vary greatly based on methodological factors. This review also (a) discusses how language may influence the development of emotion understanding, and (b) proposes a new developmental hypothesis for infants’ discrete emotion understanding.

Play for Success: An intervention to boost object exploration in infants from low-income households

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.

The Protracted Maturation of Associative Layer IIIC Pyramidal Neurons in the Human Prefrontal Cortex During Childhood: A Major Role in Cognitive Development and Selective Alteration in Autism

The human specific cognitive shift starts around the age of 2 years with the onset of self-awareness, and continues with extraordinary increase in cognitive capacities during early childhood. Diffuse changes in functional connectivity in children aged 2-6 years indicate an increase in the capacity of cortical network. Interestingly, structural network complexity does not increase during this time and, thus, it is likely to be induced by selective maturation of a specific neuronal subclass. Here, we provide an overview of a subclass of cortico-cortical neurons, the associative layer IIIC pyramids of the human prefrontal cortex. Their local axonal collaterals are in control of the prefrontal cortico-cortical output, while their long projections modulate inter-areal processing. In this way, layer IIIC pyramids are the major integrative element of cortical processing, and changes in their connectivity patterns will affect global cortical functioning. Layer IIIC neurons have a unique pattern of dendritic maturation. In contrast to other classes of principal neurons, they undergo an additional phase of extensive dendritic growth during early childhood, and show characteristic molecular changes. Taken together, circuits associated with layer IIIC neurons have the most protracted period of developmental plasticity. This unique feature is advanced but also provides a window of opportunity for pathological events to disrupt normal formation of cognitive circuits involving layer IIIC neurons. In this manuscript, we discuss how disrupted dendritic and axonal maturation of layer IIIC neurons may lead into global cortical disconnectivity, affecting development of complex communication and social abilities. We also propose a model that developmentally dictated incorporation of layer IIIC neurons into maturing cortico-cortical circuits between 2 to 6 years will reveal a previous (perinatal) lesion affecting other classes of principal neurons. This "disclosure" of pre-existing functionally silent lesions of other neuronal classes induced by development of layer IIIC associative neurons, or their direct alteration, could be found in different forms of autism spectrum disorders. Understanding the gene-environment interaction in shaping cognitive microcircuitries may be fundamental for developing rehabilitation and prevention strategies in autism spectrum and other cognitive disorders.