Continuity in social cognition from infancy to childhood

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.

Children's anthropomorphism of inanimate agents

This review article examines the extant literature on animism and anthropomorphism in infants and young children. A substantial body of work indicates that both infants and young children have a broad concept of what constitutes a sentient agent and react to inanimate objects as they do to people in the same context. The literature has also revealed a developmental pattern in which anthropomorphism decreases with age, but social robots appear to be an exception to this pattern. Additionally, the review shows that children attribute psychological properties to social robots less so than people but still anthropomorphize them. Importantly, some research suggests that anthropomorphism of social robots is dependent upon their morphology and human-like behaviors. The extent to which children anthropomorphize robots is dependent on their exposure to them and the presence of human-like features. Based on the existing literature, we conclude that in infancy, a large range of inanimate objects (e.g., boxes, geometric figures) that display animate motion patterns trigger the same behaviors observed in child-adult interactions, suggesting some implicit form of anthropomorphism. The review concludes that additional research is needed to understand what infants and children judge as social agents and how the perception of inanimate agents changes over the lifespan. As exposure to robots and virtual assistants increases, future research must focus on better understanding the full impact that regular interactions with such partners will have on children's anthropomorphizing. This article is categorized under: Psychology > Learning Cognitive Biology > Cognitive Development Computer Science and Robotics > Robotics.

Network controllability of structural connectomes in the neonatal brain

White matter connectivity supports diverse cognitive demands by efficiently constraining dynamic brain activity. This efficiency can be inferred from network controllability, which represents the ease with which the brain moves between distinct mental states based on white matter connectivity. However, it remains unclear how brain networks support diverse functions at birth, a time of rapid changes in connectivity. Here, we investigate the development of network controllability during the perinatal period and the effect of preterm birth in 521 neonates. We provide evidence that elements of controllability are exhibited in the infant's brain as early as the third trimester and develop rapidly across the perinatal period. Preterm birth disrupts the development of brain networks and altered the energy required to drive state transitions at different levels. In addition, controllability at birth is associated with cognitive ability at 18 months. Our results suggest network controllability develops rapidly during the perinatal period to support cognitive demands but could be altered by environmental impacts like preterm birth.

The Origins of Theory of Mind in Infant Social Cognition: Investigating Longitudinal Pathways from Intention Understanding and Joint Attention to Preschool Theory of Mind

A growing body of literature has established longitudinal associations between key social cognitive capacities emerging in infancy and children's subsequent theory of mind. However, existing work is limited by modest sample sizes, narrow infant measures, and theory of mind assessments with restricted variability and generalizability. The current study aimed to extend this literature by (a) recruiting a large sample of participants (n = 116; 53 boys; 63 girls; all U.S. residents; 88 White, 8 Hispanic or Latino, 2 Black or African American, 14 two or more races/ethnicities, 4 unknown; median family income: $74-122,000), (b) examining multiple measures of infant social cognition (intentional action understanding, responding to joint attention, initiating joint attention) at Time 1 (8-12 months), and (c) using an ecologically valid theory of mind assessment designed to capture individual differences in preschoolers' mental state understanding (the Children's Social Understanding Scale; Tahiroglu et al., 2014) at Time 2 (37-45 months). Measured variable path analysis revealed a significant longitudinal association between infants' initiating joint attention and later theory of mind: infants who engaged in more attempts to initiate joint attention with experimenters through gaze alternation or gestures went on to show better parent-reported mental state understanding as preschoolers. Notably, the paths from infants' responding to joint attention and intentional action understanding to later theory of mind did not emerge as significant. These findings bolster and clarify existing claims about how mental state reasoning is rooted in foundational social-cognitive capacities emerging in infancy.

The Bidirectional Social-Cognitive Mechanisms of the Social-Attention Symptoms of Autism

Differences in social attention development begin to be apparent in the 6th to 12th month of development in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and theoretically reflect important elements of its neurodevelopmental endophenotype. This paper examines alternative conceptual views of these early social attention symptoms and hypotheses about the mechanisms involved in their development. One model emphasizes mechanism involved in the spontaneous allocation of attention to faces, or social orienting. Alternatively, another model emphasizes mechanisms involved in the coordination of attention with other people, or joint attention, and the socially bi-directional nature of its development. This model raises the possibility that atypical responses of children to the attention or the gaze of a social partner directed toward themselves may be as important in the development of social attention symptoms as differences in the development of social orienting. Another model holds that symptoms of social attention may be important to early development, but may not impact older individuals with ASD. The alterative model is that the social attention symptoms in infancy (social orienting and joint attention), and social cognitive symptoms in childhood and adulthood share common neurodevelopmental substrates. Therefore, differences in early social attention and later social cognition constitute a developmentally continuous axis of symptom presentation in ASD. However, symptoms in older individuals may be best measured with in vivo measures of efficiency of social attention and social cognition in social interactions rather than the accuracy of response on analog tests used in measures with younger children. Finally, a third model suggests that the social attention symptoms may not truly be a symptom of ASD. Rather, they may be best conceptualized as stemming from differences domain general attention and motivation mechanisms. The alternative argued for here that infant social attention symptoms meet all the criteria of a unique dimension of the phenotype of ASD and the bi-directional phenomena involved in social attention cannot be fully explained in terms of domain general aspects of attention development.

Testing the stability of theory of mind: A longitudinal approach

An explicit understanding of false belief develops around the age of four years. However, tasks based on spontaneous responses have revealed an implicit understanding of belief and other theory of mind constructs in infants in their second year of life. The few longitudinal studies that have examined conceptual continuity of theory of mind from infancy to early childhood have reported mixed findings. Here we report two longitudinal experiments to investigate the developmental relation between implicit and explicit theory of mind. No link was observed in the first experiment between false belief and intention understanding measured at 14 and 18 months with the violation of expectation paradigm and tasks measuring explicit and implicit false belief at four or five years of age. In the second experiment, infants aged 18 months were tested with a battery of tasks that measured knowledge inference and false belief. They were then tested with the theory of mind scale at five years of age. The parents completed the Children's Social Understanding Scale (CSUS) and the Social Communication Questionnaire (SCQ). As in the first experiment, there were no associations between early and later forms of theory of mind. We suggest that these findings do not support the view that there is conceptual continuity in theory of mind development.

Human and monkey infant attention to dynamic social and nonsocial stimuli

The present study explored behavioral norms for infant social attention in typically developing human and nonhuman primate infants. We examined the normative development of attention to dynamic social and nonsocial stimuli longitudinally in macaques (Macaca mulatta) at 1, 3, and 5 months of age (N = 75) and humans at 2, 4, 6, 8, and 13 months of age (N = 69) using eye tracking. All infants viewed concurrently played silent videos-one social video and one nonsocial video. Both macaque and human infants were faster to look to the social than the nonsocial stimulus, and both species grew faster to orient to the social stimulus with age. Further, macaque infants' social attention increased linearly from 1 to 5 months. In contrast, human infants displayed a nonlinear pattern of social interest, with initially greater attention to the social stimulus, followed by a period of greater interest in the nonsocial stimulus, and then a rise in social interest from 6 to 13 months. Overall, human infants looked longer than macaque infants, suggesting humans have more sustained attention in the first year of life. These findings highlight potential species similarities and differences, and reflect a first step in establishing baseline patterns of early social attention development.

Theory of mind development: State of the science and future directions

This chapter offers a brief overview of how research on theory of mind development has developed over the recent years, with a focus on current research and theoretical accounts of theory of mind during the infancy period. The topics covered include the factors contributing to individual differences in theory of mind skills in preschoolers, the current replication crisis in theory of mind in infancy, the stability of theory of mind from infancy to childhood, and recent research suggesting that infants' concept of false belief is, at best, immature (e.g., overattribution to inanimate agents). Future directions in theory of mind research are suggested.

Neural correlates of infant action processing relate to theory of mind in early childhood

The mechanisms that support infant action processing are thought to be involved in the development of later social cognition. While a growing body of research demonstrates longitudinal links between action processing and explicit theory of mind (TOM), it remains unclear why this link emerges in some measures of action encoding and not others. In this paper, we recruit neural measures as a unique lens into which aspects of human infant action processing (i.e., action encoding and action execution; age 7 months) are related to preschool TOM (age 3 years; n = 31). We test whether individual differences in recruiting the sensorimotor system or attention processes during action encoding predict individual differences in TOM. Results indicate that reduced occipital alpha during action encoding predicts TOM at age 3. This finding converges with behavioral work and suggests that attentional processes involved in action encoding may support TOM. We also test whether neural processing during action execution draws on the proto-substrates of effortful control (EC). Results indicate that frontal alpha oscillatory activity during action execution predicted EC at age 3-providing strong novel evidence that infant brain activity is longitudinally linked to EC. Further, we demonstrate that EC mediates the link between the frontal alpha response and TOM. This indirect effect is specific in terms of direction, neural response, and behavior. Together, these findings converge with behavioral research and demonstrate that domain general processes show strong links to early infant action processing and TOM.

Continuity in the neural system supporting children's theory of mind development: Longitudinal links between task-independent EEG and task-dependent fMRI

Children's explicit theory of mind (ToM) understandings change over early childhood. We examined whether there is longitudinal stability in the neurobiological bases of ToM across this time period. A previous study found that source-localized resting EEG alpha attributable to the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC) and right temporoparietal junction (RTPJ) was associated with children's performance on a battery of theory of mind tasks. Here, we investigated a small subset of children (N = 12) in that original study as a preliminary investigation of whether behavioral measures of ToM performance, and/or EEG localized to the DMPFC or RTPJ predicted ToM-specific fMRI responses 3.5 years later. Results showed that preschoolers' behavioral ToM-performance positively predicted later ToM-specific fMRI responses in the DMPFC. Preschoolers' resting EEG attributable to the DMPFC also predicted later ToM-specific fMRI responses in the DMPFC. Given the small sample, results represent a first exploration and require replication. Intriguingly, they suggest that early maturation of the area of the DMPFC related to ToM reasoning is positively linked with its specific recruitment for ToM reasoning later in development, affording implications for characterizing conceptual ToM development, and its underlying neural supports.

Face Processing in Infancy and Beyond: The Case of Social Categories

Prior reviews of infant face processing have emphasized how infants respond to faces in general. This review highlights how infants come to respond differentially to social categories of faces based on differential experience, with a focus on race and gender. We examine six different behaviors: preference, recognition, scanning, category formation, association with emotion, and selective learning. Although some aspects of infant responding to face race and gender may be accounted for by traditional models of perceptual development, other aspects suggest the need for a broader model that links perceptual development with social and emotional development. We also consider how responding to face race and gender in infancy may presage responding to these categories beyond infancy and discuss how social biases favoring own-race and female faces are formed.

The relationship between temperament style and understanding of human goal-directed action in infants

The purpose of this research was to investigate the relationship between temperament style and understanding of goal-directed action in 10-11-month-old infants. Infant social understanding was assessed using a looking-time measure similar to Woodward (1998). This method yielded two measures of infant social understanding; 'decrement of attention' (a measure of infant attention during habituation) and 'novelty preference' (an index of infants' understanding of goal-directed behavior). Temperament style was provided by online parent report (IBQ; Rothbart, 1981). Infant shy/fearful temperament predicted decrement of attention scores. Novelty preference was also marginally related to shy temperament, but more strongly associated with low intensity pleasure, specifically enjoyment of physical contact with caregivers. Moreover, shy temperament continued to predict infant social understanding even when controlling for the effect of non-social intelligence (ASQ; Squires, et al., 2009). In our study, as in research with preschool-aged children (Wellman et al., 2011; Mink et al., 2014), shy, reticent temperament style is associated with social information processing, providing further evidence for continuity in individual differences in social cognition in early childhood.

Do infant sociomoral evaluation and action studies predict preschool social and behavioral adjustment?

Recent studies suggest that infants and toddlers evaluate others based on their prosocial and antisocial behaviors and engage in prosocial behaviors themselves. It is unknown to what extent infants' responses in such studies reveal stable individual differences in social and/or moral competence that persist throughout development. The current study (N = 63) demonstrates that infants' performance in sociomoral evaluation and action studies (mean age = 12 months) predicts social and behavioral adjustment at age 4 years. Specifically, a stronger preference for moral actions as an infant was associated with parent reports of fewer callous-unemotional traits, the domain most conceptually related to sociomoral evaluation and action, during preschool. Critically, preschool moral adjustment was uniquely associated with infants' sociomoral responding and not with other more general aspects of infant functioning. When 2 children with an autism spectrum disorder diagnosis were included in the sample, correlations between infant and preschool functioning were more widespread. Taken together, these results provide evidence for developmental continuity in the sociomoral domain and suggest that infants' early behavioral tendencies may be building blocks for subsequent sociomoral development.

Probing the depth of infants' theory of mind: disunity in performance across paradigms

There is currently a hot debate in the literature regarding whether or not infants have a true theory of mind (ToM) understanding. According to the mentalistic view, infants possess the same false belief understanding that older children have but their competence is masked by task demands. On the other hand, others have proposed that preverbal infants are incapable of mental state attribution and simply respond to superficial features of the events in spontaneous-responses tasks. In the current study, we aimed to clarify the nature of infants' performance in tasks designed to assess implicit theory of mind (ToM) by adopting a within-subject design that involved testing 18-month-old infants on two batteries of tasks measuring the same four ToM constructs (intention, desire, true belief, and false belief). One battery included tasks based on the violation-of- expectation (VOE) procedure, whereas the other set of tasks was based on the interactive, helping procedure. Replication of the original findings varied across tasks, due to methodological changes and the use of a within-subject design. Convergent validity was examined by comparing performance on VOE and interactive tasks that are considered to be measures of the same theory of mind concept. The results revealed no significant relations between performance on the pairs of tasks for any of the four ToM constructs measured. This pattern of results is discussed in terms of current conflicting accounts of infants' performance on implicit ToM tasks. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3vqfe_zdhA&feature=youtu.be.

Revisiting Young Children's Understanding of the Psychological Causes of Behavior

In 1989, Miller and Aloise challenged the prevailing belief that preschoolers tend to explain others' behavior in terms of external events or a person's physical attributes and have little understanding of psychological causes. That review documented preschoolers' understanding of, and even preference for, psychological causes as part of an emerging renaissance in developmental social-cognitive research. The present, updated review (97 articles, participant ages 3 months to 6 years) suggests the emergence of a transformative new perspective in which social-cognition is balanced between social and cognitive aspects rather than tilted toward cognition. Recent research on infants' awareness of mental states, young children's understanding of social categories and their judgments of the trustworthiness of informants, and cultural context reveals various ways in which preschoolers' social-causal reasoning is social.

Why (and how) should we study the interplay between emotional arousal, Theory of Mind, and inhibitory control to understand moral cognition?

Findings in the field of experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience have shed new light on our understanding of the psychological and biological bases of morality. Although a lot of attention has been devoted to understanding the processes that underlie complex moral dilemmas, attempts to represent the way in which individuals generate moral judgments when processing basic harmful actions are rare. Here, we will outline a model of morality which proposes that the evaluation of basic harmful actions relies on complex interactions between emotional arousal, Theory of Mind (ToM) capacities, and inhibitory control resources. This model makes clear predictions regarding the cognitive processes underlying the development of and ability to generate moral judgments. We draw on data from developmental and cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and psychopathology research to evaluate the model and propose several conceptual and methodological improvements that are needed to further advance our understanding of moral cognition and its development.

Moral learning as intuitive theory revision

We argue that moral learning, like much of conceptual development more generally, involves development and change in children's intuitive theories of the world. Children's intuitive theories involve coherent and abstract representations of the world, which point to domain-specific, unobservable causal-explanatory entities. From this perspective, children rely on intuitive sociological theories (in particular, an abstract expectation that group memberships constrain people's obligations), and their intuitive psychological theories (including expectations that mental states motivate individual behavior) to predict, explain, and evaluate morally-relevant action. Thus, moral learning involves development and change in each of these theories of the world across childhood, as well as developmental change in how children integrate information from these two intuitive theories. This perspective is supported by a series of research studies on young children's moral reasoning and learning, and compared to other developmental approaches, including more traditional forms of constructivism and more recent nativist perspectives.

Goal Attribution toward Non-Human Objects during Infancy Predicts Imaginary Companion Status during Preschool Years

It has been shown that there is a significant relationship between children's mentalizing skills and creation of an imaginary companion (IC). Theorists have proposed that interaction with an IC may improve mentalizing skills, but it is also possible that children's mentalizing skills affect their creation of an IC. In this longitudinal study, we examined whether goal attribution in infants younger than 1 years old (Time 1) predicted their creation of ICs at 48 months old (Time 2). At Time 1, infants' goal attribution was measured in an action prediction experiment, where infants anticipated three types of action goals: (1) another person's goal-directed action (GH condition); (2) another person's non-goal-directed (BH condition); and (3) a mechanical claw's goal-directed action (MC condition). At Time 2, parents completed questionnaires assessing whether their children had ICs. The path analyses using Bayesian estimation revealed that infants' anticipation in the MC condition, but not in the GH and BH conditions, predicted their later IC status. These results indicate that infants' goal attributions to non-human agents may be a strong predictor of their later IC creation. Early mentalizing skills toward non-human objects may provide children with a basis for their engagement in imaginative play.

Efeito de um Programa de Histórias com Abordagem Sociocognitiva em Crianças de Educação Infantil

RESUMO Este estudo objetivou avaliar um programa para promoção de habilidades sociocognitivas, baseado na leitura de histórias, quanto a possíveis efeitos no desenvolvimento sociocognitivo e comportamental. O programa conta com 25 livros infantis, ricos em pistas sociais. Participaram duas turmas consecutivas da educação infantil, compondo dois grupos, GI e GII. Para aferir efeitos do programa, foram avaliadas habilidades sociocognitivas, habilidades sociais e problemas de comportamento. GI foi avaliado antes e depois de passar pelo programa. No ano seguinte, GII foi avaliado antes da intervenção duas vezes, com intervalo equivalente ao da duração do programa, e novamente depois da intervenção. Comparações entre e intra grupos mostraram aumento nas habilidades sociocognitivas e sociais, bem como redução de dificuldades comportamentais, sugerindo efeitos positivos do programa.

Variability in social reasoning: the influence of attachment security on the attribution of goals

Over the last half decade there has been a growing move to apply the methods and theory of cognitive development to questions regarding infants' social understanding. Though this combination has afforded exciting opportunities to better understand our species' unique social cognitive abilities, the resulting findings do not always lead to the same conclusions. For example, a growing body of research has found support for both universal similarity and individual differences in infants' social reasoning about others' responses to incomplete goals. The present research examines this apparent contradiction by assessing the influence of attachment security on the ability of university undergraduates to represent instrumental needs versus social-emotional distress. When the two varieties of goals were clearly differentiated, we observed a universally similar pattern of results (Experiments 1A/B). However, when the goals were combined, and both instrumental need and social-emotional distress were presented together, individual differences emerged (Experiments 2 and 3). Taken together, these results demonstrate that by integrating the two perspectives of shared universals and individual differences, important points of contact can be revealed supporting a deeper, more nuanced understanding of the nature of human social reasoning.

Developmental pathways for social understanding: linking social cognition to social contexts

Contemporary research, often with looking-time tasks, reveals that infants possess foundational understandings of their social worlds. However, few studies have examined how these early social cognitions relate to the child’s social interactions and behavior in early development. Does an early understanding of the social world relate to how an infant interacts with his or her parents? Do early social interactions along with social-cognitive understandings in infancy predict later preschool social competencies? In the current paper, we propose a theory in which children’s later social behaviors and their understanding of the social world depend on the integration of early social understanding and experiences in infancy. We review several of our studies, as well as other research, that directly examine the pathways between these competencies to support a hypothesized network of relations between social-cognitive development and social-interactive behaviors in the development from infancy to childhood. In total, these findings reveal differences in infant social competences that both track the developmental trajectory of infants’ understanding of people over the first years of life and provide external validation for the large body of social-cognitive findings emerging from laboratory looking-time paradigms.

Connecting the dots from infancy to childhood: a longitudinal study connecting gaze following, language, and explicit theory of mind

This longitudinal study tested the same children at three time points: infancy (10.5 months of age), toddlerhood (2.5 years of age), and early childhood (4.5 years of age). At 10.5 months, infants were assessed experimentally with a gaze-following paradigm. At 2.5 years, children's language skills were measured using the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories. At 4.5 years, children's explicit theory of mind was assessed with a standard test battery. Analyses revealed that infants with higher gaze-following scores at 10.5 months produced significantly more mental-state words at 2.5 years and that children with more mental-state words at 2.5 years were more successful on the theory-of-mind battery at 4.5 years. These predictive longitudinal relationships remained significant after controlling for general language, maternal education, and nonsocial attention. The results illuminate the bridging role that language plays in connecting infants' social cognition to children's later understanding of others' mental states. The obtained specificity in the longitudinal relations informs theories concerning mechanisms of developmental change.

Definitions and Developmental Processes in Research on Infant Morality

Key terms in research on moral development also exist in everyday language. Tafreshi and her colleagues (2014) propose that researchers should use terms in ways consistent with their usage by non-researchers. This commentary questions this claim, and argues for the importance of providing clear and explicit definitions of terms such as "morality" and "innate," of showing caution when attributing evaluations and judgments to infants, and of considering developmental processes preceding and succeeding the abilities demonstrated using looking-time and related measures. Progress is unlikely to result from conceptual analysis alone. However, conceptual clarity will make it easier to see what theories agree and disagree about as well as how opposing claims can be tested empirically.

Social understanding and self-regulation predict pre-schoolers’ sharing with friends and disliked peers

This study examined longitudinal relations between early measures of prosocial action in infancy as well as cognitive and social-cognitive abilities, and the sharing behaviour of preschool children. The results reveal relations between delay-of-gratification at 24 months and inhibitory control at 30 months, and children’s sharing at 5 years. Moreover, the analyses showed specific relations between distress understanding at 24 months and preschool children’s sharing with friends, and a relation between goal encoding at 7 months and sharing with a disliked other at 5 years. Yet, there were no relations between early measures of prosociality in infancy and preschool children’s sharing. The results support the view that inhibitory control competencies and social-cognitive abilities play an important role in the early development of prosocial action.

Annual research review: Towards a developmental neuroscience of atypical social cognition

As a starting point for our review we use a developmental timeline, starting from birth and divided into major developmental epochs defined by key milestones of social cognition in typical development. For each epoch, we highlight those developmental disorders that diverge from the normal developmental pattern, what is known about these key milestones in the major disorders affecting social cognition, and any available research on the neural basis of these differences. We relate behavioural observations to four major networks of the social brain, that is, Amygdala, Mentalizing, Emotion and Mirror networks. We focus on those developmental disorders that are characterized primarily by social atypicality, such as autism spectrum disorder, social anxiety and a variety of genetically defined syndromes. The processes and aspects of social cognition we highlight are sketched in a putative network diagram, and include: agent identification, emotion processing and empathy, mental state attribution, self-processing and social hierarchy mapping involving social ‘policing’ and in-group/out-group categorization. Developmental disorders reveal some dissociable deficits in different components of this map of social cognition. This broad review across disorders, ages and aspects of social cognition leads us to some key questions: How can we best distinguish primary from secondary social disorders? Is social cognition especially vulnerable to developmental disorder, or surprisingly robust? Are cascading notions of social development, in which early functions are essential stepping stones or building bricks for later abilities, necessarily correct?

Mirroring and the development of action understanding

The discovery of mirror neurons in the monkey motor cortex has inspired wide-ranging hypotheses about the potential relationship between action control and social cognition. In this paper, we consider the hypothesis that this relationship supports the early development of a critical aspect of social understanding, the ability to analyse others' actions in terms of goals. Recent investigations of infant action understanding have revealed rich connections between motor development and the analysis of goals in others' actions. In particular, infants' own goal-directed actions influence their analysis of others' goals. This evidence indicates that the cognitive systems that drive infants' own actions contribute to their analysis of goals in others' actions. These effects occur at a relatively abstract level of analysis both in terms of the structure infants perceive in others' actions and relevant structure in infants' own actions. Although the neural bases of these effects in infants are not yet well understood, current evidence indicates that connections between action production and action perception in infancy involve the interrelated neural systems at work in generating planned, intelligent action.

The Social Context of Infant Intention Understanding

Traditional looking-time paradigms are often used to assess infants' attention to socio-cognitive phenomena, but the link between these laboratory scenarios and real-world interactions is unclear. The current study investigated hypothesized relations between traditional social-cognitive looking-time paradigms and their real-world counterparts in caregiver-infant social interaction. Seventy-five 10- to 12-month-old infants participated in a structured play session with their caregiver, as well as a traditional looking-time paradigm targeting intentional action. Infants' ability to quickly parse intentional displays correlated with several key qualities of their everyday interactions. In particular, caregiver and infant interaction quality, maternal supportiveness, caregiver and infant joint engagement skill, and social attentiveness in infants correlated with faster habituation to looking-time displays. These results support a linkage between social-cognitive looking-time laboratory paradigms and more naturalistic partner interaction, at this key age. The data both provide external validation for the large body of social-cognitive findings emerging from laboratory looking-time paradigms, and contribute to a growing literature tracking the developmental trajectory of infants' understanding of people over the first two years.

Human infancy…and the rest of the lifespan

Human infancy has been studied as a platform for hypothesis and theory testing, as a major physiological and psychological adjustment, as an object of adults' effects as well as a source of effects on adults, for its comparative value, as a stage of life, and as a setting point for the life course. Following an orientation to infancy studies, including previous reviews and a discussion of the special challenges infants pose to research, this article focuses on infancy as a foundation and catalyst of human development in the balance of the life course. Studies of stability and prediction from infancy illustrate the depth and complexity of modern research on infants and provide a long-awaited reply to key philosophical and practical questions about the meaningfulness and significance of infancy.

Enactment of third-party punishment by 4-year-olds

When prompted, preschoolers advocate punishment for moral transgressions against third parties, but little is known about whether and how they might act out such punishment. In this study, adult demonstrators enacted doll stories in which a perpetrator child doll made an unprovoked attack on a victim child doll, after which an adult doll punished either the perpetrator (consistent punishment) or victim (inconsistent punishment). When asked to help retell the story, given free choice of their own preferred actions for the adult doll, 4-year-olds (N = 32) were influenced by the demonstrated choice of target when selecting a target for punishment or admonishment. This influence was weak following inconsistent punishment, however, because the participants tended to change the story by punishing or admonishing the perpetrator when the demonstrator had punished the victim. Four-year-olds’ tendency to select a moral rule violator as a target for punishment is therefore stronger than their tendency to copy the specific actions of adults, which itself is known to be very strong. The evidence suggests that 4-year-olds’ enactment of punishment is at least partially based on a belief that antisocial actions deserve to be punished.

Twelve-month-olds' understanding of intention transfer through communication

Do infants understand that intention can be transferred through communication? We answered this question by examining 12-month-olds' looking times in a violation-of-expectation paradigm with two human agents. In familiarization, the non-acting agent spoke, clapped her hands, read aloud a book, or remained silent before the acting agent grasped one (the target) of two objects. During test only the non-actor remained, grasping either the target or distractor. The infants looked longer in the distractor than target condition, suggesting violation of expectation, only if the non-actor had spoken or clapped in familiarization. Because the non-actor never had grasped any of the objects in familiarization, the infants' expectation on her behavior could have developed from the understanding that her intention was transferred to the actor, who executed it by grasping the target in familiarization, via speaking and clapping as acts of communication (but not reading aloud and remaining silent).

Continuity from an implicit to an explicit understanding of false belief from infancy to preschool age

An implicit understanding of false belief indicated by anticipatory looking has been shown to be significantly correlated with performance on explicit false-belief tasks in 3- and 4-year-old children (Low, 2010). Recent evidence from infant research indicates, however, that implicit false-belief understanding guides infants' expectations about goal-directed actions even in the second year of life. The present study presents data from a sample of N= 70 infants who were tested longitudinally at 15, 18, 30, 36 and 48 months with implicit and explicit Theory of Mind measures, as well as an assessment of verbal IQ. Belief-based anticipatory looking in the false-belief task at 18 months significantly predicted verbal false-belief reasoning at 48 months, after controlling for verbal IQ. These findings indicate developmental continuity and conceptual specificity in belief reasoning from infancy to preschool age. They are discussed with respect to competing accounts of infants' understanding of the mind.

Early intention understandings that are common to primates predict children's later theory of mind

Intention understanding emerges early in human development, manifest in deep and robust fashions even in infants. Overlapping intention understandings, encompassing agents as intentional actors and experiencers, are evident in nonhuman primates in more limited fashions. Intention understandings, of the sort shared by infants and nonhuman primates, predict the more comprehensive theory-of-mind understandings of older children. Those early understandings provide a platform for the ontogenesis of further, deeper achievements in the human case.