Five-month-old infants attribute inferences based on general knowledge to agents

A symmetry-based mechanism for perceptual grouping in preverbal infants

Newborn chicks can solve complex numerical discriminations through a purely perceptual mechanism based on the possibility of creating all equal-sized subsets. The present work investigates whether this is a prerogative of precocial birds or whether an analogous mechanism can be found in humans. We familiarized 8-month-olds with sets of even numerosities (i.e., decomposable in equal-sized subsets), and then we tested them for their spontaneous preference between two novel sets, one that cannot be divided into equal-sized subsets (i.e., a prime numerosity) and one decomposable in equal-sized subsets (i.e., a non-prime odd numerosity). Infants were tested with either the 7vs.9 comparison (i.e., the prime being smaller) or the 9vs.11 comparison (i.e., the prime being larger). Infants oriented their gaze more often toward the prime set of elements, irrespective of whether it was smaller or larger in the comparison, similar to the preference observed in baby chicks. Overall, our results suggest an early-emerging perceptual mechanism that can support complex numerical discriminations, that might be shared between distantly related and ecologically different species.

Understanding a Third-Party Communicative Situation in Korean-Learning Infants

The present study tested 14-month-old monolingual infants (N = 64, 52% female, 75% Korean, and 25% American) in a looking-time task adapted from previous referent identification research. In three experiments, Korean-learning infants watched a speaker, who could only see one of two identical balls, ask a recipient, "gong jom jul-lae?" ("Will you give me Ø ball?" because Korean lacks an article system). They expected the recipient to reach for the ball visible to the speaker, but not the one hidden from her, only when the speaker was introduced separately to facilitate perspective-taking. Korean infants were also found to hold these expectations when the speaker said, "jeo gong jom jul-lae?" ("Will you give me that ball?"), presumably because the added demonstrative "jeo" rendered the speech more informative. A group of American English-learning infants performed similarly, but not as robustly as did their Korean peers, when the speaker requested "Give me that ball." These findings shed new light on how infants use their emergent perspective-taking and language skills to interpret a speaker's intended referent and expand the previous focus on English-learning infants.

The Cognitive Architecture of Infant Attachment

Meta-analytic evidence indicates that the quality of the attachment relationship that infants establish with their primary caregiver has enduring significance for socioemotional and cognitive outcomes. However, the mechanisms by which early attachment experiences contribute to subsequent development remain underspecified. According to attachment theory, early attachment experiences become embodied in the form of cognitive-affective representations, referred to as internal working models (IWMs), that guide future behavior. Little is known, however, about the cognitive architecture of IWMs in infancy. In this article, we discuss significant advances made in the field of infant cognitive development and propose that leveraging insights from this research has the potential to fundamentally shape our understanding of the cognitive architecture of attachment representations in infancy. We also propose that the integration of attachment research into cognitive research can shed light on the role of early experiences, individual differences, and stability and change in infant cognition, as well as open new routes of investigation in cognitive studies, which will further our understanding of human knowledge. We provide recommendations for future research throughout the article and conclude by using our collaborative research as an example.

The pupil collaboration: A multi-lab, multi-method analysis of goal attribution in infants

The rise of pupillometry in infant research over the last decade is associated with a variety of methods for data preprocessing and analysis. Although pupil diameter is increasingly recognized as an alternative measure of the popular cumulative looking time approach used in many studies (Jackson & Sirois, 2022), an open question is whether the many approaches used to analyse this variable converge. To this end, we proposed a crowdsourced approach to pupillometry analysis. A dataset from 30 9-month-old infants (15 girls; Mage = 282.9 days, SD = 8.10) was provided to 7 distinct teams for analysis. The data were obtained from infants watching video sequences showing a hand, initially resting between two toys, grabbing one of them (after Woodward, 1998). After habituation, infants were shown (in random order) a sequence of four test events that varied target position and target toy. Results show that looking times reflect primarily the familiar path of the hand, regardless of target toy. Gaze data similarly show this familiarity effect of path. The pupil dilation analyses show that features of pupil baseline measures (duration and temporal location) as well as data retention variation (trial and/or participant) due to different inclusion criteria from the various analysis methods are linked to divergences in findings. Two of the seven teams found no significant findings, whereas the remaining five teams differ in the pattern of findings for main and interaction effects. The discussion proposes guidelines for best practice in the analysis of pupillometry data.

Understanding preferences in infancy

A preference is defined as a dispositional state that helps explain why a person chooses one option over another. Preference understanding is a significant part of interpreting and predicting others' behavior, which can also help to guide social encounters, for instance, to initiate interactions and even form relationships based on shared preferences. Cognitive developmental research in the past several decades has revealed that infants have relatively sophisticated understandings about others' preferences, as part of investigations into how young children make sense of others' behavior in terms of mental states such as intentions, dispositions including preferences, and epistemic states. In recent years, research on early psychological knowledge expands to including infant understanding of social situations. As such, infants are also found to use their preference understandings in their social life. They treat favorably others who share their own preferences, and they prefer prosocial and similar others (e.g., those who speak their language). In reviewing these results, we point out future directions for research and conclude with further suggestions and recommendations. This article is categorized under: Cognitive Biology > Cognitive Development Psychology > Development and Aging.

Can 5-month-old infants consider the perspective of a novel eyeless agent? New evidence for early mentalistic reasoning

Is early reasoning about an agent's knowledge best characterized by a mentalistic stance, a teleological stance, or both? In this research, 5-month-old infants (N = 64, 50% female, 83% White) saw a novel eyeless agent consistently approach object-A as opposed to object-B. Although infants could always see both objects, a screen separated object-B from the agent. When object-B protruded above the screen, infants interpreted the agent's actions as revealing a preference for object-A over object-B. When object-B did not protrude above the screen, however, infants refrained from attributing such a preference: Consistent with mentalistic accounts, they reasoned that the agent's representation of the scene did not include object-B, and they used the agent's incomplete representation, non-egocentrically, to interpret its actions.