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Thiele M, Kalinke S, Michel C, Haun DBM. Direct and Observed Joint Attention Modulate 9-Month-Old Infants' Object Encoding. Open Mind (Camb) 2023; 7:917-946. [PMID: 38053630 PMCID: PMC10695677 DOI: 10.1162/opmi_a_00114] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/04/2023] [Accepted: 09/25/2023] [Indexed: 12/07/2023] Open
Abstract
Sharing joint visual attention to an object with another person biases infants to encode qualitatively different object properties compared to a parallel attention situation lacking interpersonal sharedness. This study investigated whether merely observing joint attention amongst others shows the same effect. In Experiment 1 (first-party replication experiment), N = 36 9-month-old German infants were presented with a violation-of-expectation task during which they saw an adult looking either in the direction of the infant (eye contact) or to the side (no eye contact) before and after looking at an object. Following an occlusion phase, infants saw one of three different outcomes: the same object reappeared at the same screen position (no change), the same object reappeared at a novel position (location change), or a novel object appeared at the same position (identity change). We found that infants looked longer at identity change outcomes (vs. no changes) in the "eye contact" condition compared to the "no eye contact" condition. In contrast, infants' response to location changes was not influenced by the presence of eye contact. In Experiment 2, we found the same result pattern in a matched third-party design, in which another sample of N = 36 9-month-old German infants saw two adults establishing eye contact (or no eye contact) before alternating their gaze between an object and their partner without ever looking at the infant. These findings indicate that infants learn similarly from interacting with others and observing others interact, suggesting that infant cultural learning extends beyond infant-directed interactions.
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Affiliation(s)
- Maleen Thiele
- Department of Comparative Cultural Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany
| | - Steven Kalinke
- Department of Comparative Cultural Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany
| | - Christine Michel
- Department of Early Child Development and Culture, Leipzig University, Leipzig, Germany
- SRH University of Applied Health Sciences, Gera, Germany
| | - Daniel B. M. Haun
- Department of Comparative Cultural Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany
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Neff MB, Martin A. Do face-to-face interactions support 6-month-olds' understanding of the communicative function of speech? Infancy 2023; 28:240-256. [PMID: 36129215 DOI: 10.1111/infa.12507] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 02/05/2023]
Abstract
Infants by 6 months recognize that speech communicates information between third parties. We investigated whether 6-month-olds always expect speech to communicate or whether they also consider social features of communication, like how interlocutors engage with one another. A small sample of infants watched an actor (the Speaker) choose one of two objects to play with (the target). When the Speaker could no longer reach her target object, she turned to a new actor (the Listener) and said a nonsense word. During speech, the actors were either face-to-face, the Speaker was facing away from the Listener, or the reverse. When the actors had been face-to-face, infants looked longer when the Listener selected the non-target object compared to the target. Infants looked equally regardless of what the Listener chose when either actor had been disengaged. Area-of-interest gaze coding suggests that infants were similarly interested in the interaction across conditions, but their pattern of attention to Speaker and Listener differed when the Listener was disengaged during speech. Although these experiments should be replicated with a larger sample, the findings provide initial evidence that 6-month-olds do not expect speech alone to communicate, but also attend to the social context in which speech is produced.
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Affiliation(s)
- Mary Beth Neff
- Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway.,School of Psychology, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand
| | - Alia Martin
- School of Psychology, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand
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Farris K, Kelsey CM, Krol KM, Thiele M, Hepach R, Haun DB, Grossmann T. Processing third-party social interactions in the human infant brain. Infant Behav Dev 2022; 68:101727. [PMID: 35667276 DOI: 10.1016/j.infbeh.2022.101727] [Citation(s) in RCA: 5] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/29/2021] [Revised: 05/25/2022] [Accepted: 05/25/2022] [Indexed: 11/21/2022]
Abstract
The understanding of developing social brain functions during infancy relies on research that has focused on studying how infants engage in first-person social interactions or view individual agents and their actions. Behavioral research suggests that observing and learning from third-party social interactions plays a foundational role in early social and moral development. However, the brain systems involved in observing third-party social interactions during infancy are unknown. The current study tested the hypothesis that brain systems in prefrontal and temporal cortex, previously identified in adults and children, begin to specialize in third-party social interaction processing during infancy. Infants (N = 62), ranging from 6 to 13 months in age, had their brain responses measured using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) while viewing third-party social interactions and two control conditions, infants viewing two individual actions and infants viewing inverted social interactions. The results show that infants preferentially engage brain regions localized within the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex when viewing third-party social interactions. These findings suggest that brain systems processing third-party social interaction begin to develop early in human ontogeny and may thus play a foundational role in supporting the interpretation of and learning from social interactions.
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Thiele M, Hepach R, Michel C, Haun D. Infants' Preference for Social Interactions Increases from 7 to 13 Months of Age. Child Dev 2021; 92:2577-2594. [PMID: 34292588 DOI: 10.1111/cdev.13636] [Citation(s) in RCA: 4] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/13/2020] [Revised: 06/02/2021] [Accepted: 06/15/2021] [Indexed: 11/27/2022]
Abstract
This study examined 7-to-13.5-month-old middle-class Western infants' visual orienting to third-party interactions in parallel with their social attention behavior during own social interactions (Leipzig, Germany). In Experiment 1, 9.5- to-11-month-olds (n = 20) looked longer than 7- to-8.5-month-olds (n = 20) at videos showing two adults interacting with one another when simultaneously presented with a scene showing two adults acting individually. Moreover, older infants showed higher social engagement (including joint attention) during parent-infant free play. Experiment 2 replicated this age-related increase in both measures and showed that it follows continuous trajectories from 7 to 13.5 months (n = 50). This suggests that infants' attentional orienting to others' interactions coincides with parallel developments in their social attention behavior during own social interactions.
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Affiliation(s)
- Maleen Thiele
- Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.,Leipzig University
| | | | - Christine Michel
- Leipzig University.,Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences
| | - Daniel Haun
- Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.,Leipzig University
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Thiele M, Hepach R, Michel C, Gredebäck G, Haun DBM. Social interaction targets enhance 13‐month‐old infants' associative learning. Infancy 2021; 26:409-422. [DOI: 10.1111/infa.12393] [Citation(s) in RCA: 8] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.7] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 05/25/2020] [Revised: 10/27/2020] [Accepted: 02/01/2021] [Indexed: 11/30/2022]
Affiliation(s)
- Maleen Thiele
- Department of Comparative Cultural Psychology Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology Leipzig Germany
- Department of Early Child Development and Culture Leipzig University Leipzig Germany
| | - Robert Hepach
- Department of Experimental Psychology University of Oxford Oxford UK
| | - Christine Michel
- Department of Early Child Development and Culture Leipzig University Leipzig Germany
- Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences Leipzig Germany
| | | | - Daniel B. M. Haun
- Department of Comparative Cultural Psychology Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology Leipzig Germany
- Department of Early Child Development and Culture Leipzig University Leipzig Germany
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Stefanov K, Beskow J, Salvi G. Self-Supervised Vision-Based Detection of the Active Speaker as Support for Socially Aware Language Acquisition. IEEE Trans Cogn Dev Syst 2020. [DOI: 10.1109/tcds.2019.2927941] [Citation(s) in RCA: 8] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/10/2022]
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Meng X, Uto Y, Hashiya K. Observing Third-Party Attentional Relationships Affects Infants' Gaze Following: An Eye-Tracking Study. Front Psychol 2017; 7:2065. [PMID: 28149284 PMCID: PMC5241306 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.02065] [Citation(s) in RCA: 6] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.9] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/13/2016] [Accepted: 12/21/2016] [Indexed: 12/18/2022] Open
Abstract
Not only responding to direct social actions toward themselves, infants also pay attention to relevant information from third-party interactions. However, it is unclear whether and how infants recognize the structure of these interactions. The current study aimed to investigate how infants' observation of third-party attentional relationships influence their subsequent gaze following. Nine-month-old, 1-year-old, and 1.5-year-old infants (N = 72, 37 girls) observed video clips in which a female actor gazed at one of two toys after she and her partner either silently faced each other (face-to-face condition) or looked in opposite directions (back-to-back condition). An eye tracker was used to record the infants' looking behavior (e.g., looking time, looking frequency). The analyses revealed that younger infants followed the actor's gaze toward the target object in both conditions, but this was not the case for the 1.5-year-old infants in the back-to-back condition. Furthermore, we found that infants' gaze following could be negatively predicted by their expectation of the partner's response to the actor's head turn (i.e., they shift their gaze toward the partner immediately after they realize that the actor's head will turn). These findings suggested that the sensitivity to the difference in knowledge and attentional states in the second year of human life could be extended to third-party interactions, even without any direct involvement in the situation. Additionally, a spontaneous concern with the epistemic gap between self and other, as well as between others, develops by this age. These processes might be considered part of the fundamental basis for human communication.
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Affiliation(s)
- Xianwei Meng
- Graduate School of Human-Environment Studies, Kyushu UniversityFukuoka, Japan
- Japan Society for the Promotion of ScienceTokyo, Japan
| | - Yusuke Uto
- Graduate School of Human-Environment Studies, Kyushu UniversityFukuoka, Japan
| | - Kazuhide Hashiya
- Faculty of Human-Environment Studies, Kyushu UniversityFukuoka, Japan
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Gustafsson E, Brisson J, Mailloux D, Mainville M, Beaulieu C, Sirois S. Do Infants Recognize Engagement in Social Interactions? The Case of Face-to-Face Conversation. Infancy 2016. [DOI: 10.1111/infa.12135] [Citation(s) in RCA: 2] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/27/2022]
Affiliation(s)
| | - Julie Brisson
- Département de Psychologie; Laboratoire Psychologie et Neurosciences de la Cognition et de l'Affectivité; Université de Rouen
| | - Dominique Mailloux
- Chaire de Recherche du Canada en Neuroscience du Développement Cognitif; Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières
| | - Marc Mainville
- Chaire de Recherche du Canada en Neuroscience du Développement Cognitif; Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières
| | - Christelle Beaulieu
- Chaire de Recherche du Canada en Neuroscience du Développement Cognitif; Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières
| | - Sylvain Sirois
- Chaire de Recherche du Canada en Neuroscience du Développement Cognitif; Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières
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Fawcett C, Gredebäck G. Eighteen-Month-Olds, but not 14-Month-Olds, Use Social Context to Bind Action Sequences. Infancy 2015; 20:115-125. [PMID: 26640417 PMCID: PMC4657481 DOI: 10.1111/infa.12062] [Citation(s) in RCA: 12] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 01/28/2014] [Revised: 09/11/2014] [Accepted: 09/18/2014] [Indexed: 11/30/2022]
Abstract
We demonstrate that 18-month-olds, but not 14-month-olds, can anticipate others' actions based on an interpretation of shared goals that bind together individual actions into a collaborative sequence. After viewing a sequence of actions performed by two people who socially interact, 18-month-olds bound together the socially engaged actors' actions such that they later expected the actors to share the same final goal. Eighteen-month-olds who saw nonsocially engaged actors did not have this expectation and neither did 14-month-olds when viewing either socially or nonsocially engaged actors. The results are discussed in light of the possibility that experience in collaborations could be necessary for understanding collaboration from a third-person perspective.
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Affiliation(s)
- Christine Fawcett
- Uppsala Child and Baby Lab, Department of Psychology, Uppsala University
| | - Gustaf Gredebäck
- Uppsala Child and Baby Lab, Department of Psychology, Uppsala University
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Wilkinson NM, Metta G. Capture of fixation by rotational flow; a deterministic hypothesis regarding scaling and stochasticity in fixational eye movements. Front Syst Neurosci 2014; 8:29. [PMID: 24616670 PMCID: PMC3935396 DOI: 10.3389/fnsys.2014.00029] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 12/06/2013] [Accepted: 02/09/2014] [Indexed: 11/13/2022] Open
Abstract
Visual scan paths exhibit complex, stochastic dynamics. Even during visual fixation, the eye is in constant motion. Fixational drift and tremor are thought to reflect fluctuations in the persistent neural activity of neural integrators in the oculomotor brainstem, which integrate sequences of transient saccadic velocity signals into a short term memory of eye position. Despite intensive research and much progress, the precise mechanisms by which oculomotor posture is maintained remain elusive. Drift exhibits a stochastic statistical profile which has been modeled using random walk formalisms. Tremor is widely dismissed as noise. Here we focus on the dynamical profile of fixational tremor, and argue that tremor may be a signal which usefully reflects the workings of oculomotor postural control. We identify signatures reminiscent of a certain flavor of transient neurodynamics; toric traveling waves which rotate around a central phase singularity. Spiral waves play an organizational role in dynamical systems at many scales throughout nature, though their potential functional role in brain activity remains a matter of educated speculation. Spiral waves have a repertoire of functionally interesting dynamical properties, including persistence, which suggest that they could in theory contribute to persistent neural activity in the oculomotor postural control system. Whilst speculative, the singularity hypothesis of oculomotor postural control implies testable predictions, and could provide the beginnings of an integrated dynamical framework for eye movements across scales.
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Affiliation(s)
| | - Giorgio Metta
- iCub Facility, Fondazione Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia Genova, Italy ; Centre for Robotics and Neural Systems, School of Computing and Mathematics, University of Plymouth Plymouth, UK
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