Infants rationally infer the goals of other people's reaches in the absence of first-person experience with reaching actions

15-Month-Olds' Understanding of Imitation in Social and Instrumental Contexts

From early in development, humans use imitation to express social engagement, to understand social affiliations, and to learn from others. Nevertheless, the social and instrumental goals that drive imitation in everyday and pedagogical contexts are highly intertwined. What cues might infants use to infer that a social goal is driving imitation? Here we use minimal and tightly controlled visual displays to evaluate 15-month-olds' attribution of social goals to imitation. In particular, we ask whether they see the very same simple, imitative actions shared between two agents as social or nonsocial when those actions occur in the absence or presence of intentional cues such as obstacles, object goals, and efficient, causally effective action. Our results suggest that infants' attributing social value to imitation only in the absence of such intentional cues may be a signature of humans' early understanding of imitation. We propose, moreover, that a systematic evaluation of a set of simple scenarios that probe candidate principles of early knowledge about social and instrumental actions and goals is possible and promises to inform our understanding of the foundational knowledge on which human social learning is built, as well as to aid the building of human-like artificial intelligence.

Perceptual and conceptual novelty independently guide infant looking behaviour: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Human infants are born with their eyes open and an otherwise limited motor repertoire; thus, studies measuring infant looking are commonly used to investigate the developmental origins of perception and cognition. However, scholars have long expressed concerns about the reliability and interpretation of looking behaviours. We evaluated these concerns using a pre-registered ( https://osf.io/jghc3 ), systematic meta-analysis of 76 published and unpublished studies of infants' early physical and psychological reasoning (total n = 1,899; 3- to 12-month-old infants; database search and call for unpublished studies conducted July to August 2022). We studied two effects in the same datasets: looking towards expected versus unexpected events (violation of expectation (VOE)) and looking towards visually familiar versus visually novel events (perceptual novelty (PN)). Most studies implemented methods to minimize the risk of bias (for example, ensuring that experimenters were naive to the conditions and reporting inter-rater reliability). There was mixed evidence about publication bias for the VOE effect. Most centrally to our research aims, we found that these two effects varied systematically-with roughly equal effect sizes (VOE, standardized mean difference 0.290 and 95% confidence interval (0.208, 0.372); PN, standardized mean difference 0.239 and 95% confidence interval (0.109, 0.369))-but independently, based on different predictors. Age predicted infants' looking responses to unexpected events, but not visually novel events. Habituation predicted infants' looking responses to visually novel events, but not unexpected events. From these findings, we suggest that conceptual and perceptual novelty independently influence infants' looking behaviour.

Do dogs preferentially encode the identity of the target object or the location of others' actions?

The ability to make sense of and predict others' actions is foundational for many socio-cognitive abilities. Dogs (Canis familiaris) constitute interesting comparative models for the study of action perception due to their marked sensitivity to human actions. We tested companion dogs (N = 21) in two screen-based eye-tracking experiments, adopting a task previously used with human infants and apes, to assess which aspects of an agent's action dogs consider relevant to the agent's underlying intentions. An agent was shown repeatedly acting upon the same one of two objects, positioned in the same location. We then presented the objects in swapped locations and the agent approached the objects centrally (Experiment 1) or the old object in the new location or the new object in the old location (Experiment 2). Dogs' anticipatory fixations and looking times did not reflect an expectation that agents should have continued approaching the same object nor the same location as witnessed during the brief familiarization phase; this contrasts with some findings with infants and apes, but aligns with findings in younger infants before they have sufficient motor experience with the observed action. However, dogs' pupil dilation and latency to make an anticipatory fixation suggested that, if anything, dogs expected the agents to keep approaching the same location rather than the same object, and their looking times showed sensitivity to the animacy of the agents. We conclude that dogs, lacking motor experience with the observed actions of grasping or kicking performed by a human or inanimate agent, might interpret such actions as directed toward a specific location rather than a specific object. Future research will need to further probe the suitability of anticipatory looking as measure of dogs' socio-cognitive abilities given differences between the visual systems of dogs and primates.