Infants' online perception of give-and-take interactions

Intact or impaired? The understanding of give-and-take interactions in children with autism spectrum disorder

BACKGROUND

Understanding and predicting others' behavior in a dynamic and rapidly changing world is a fundamental aspect of social interactions. However, it remains unclear as to whether children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) could understand and predict goal-directed social actions.

AIMS

To investigate the understanding of give-and-take interactions in children with ASD with the use of eye tracking.

METHODS AND PROCEDURES

Experiment 1 and 2 investigated the understanding of giving and taking respectively in 5-to 8-year-old Chinese children with ASD and typically developing children by using the eye-tracking technology.

OUTCOMES AND RESULTS

We found that children with ASD could predict actions, but they were less proficient in processing give-and-take interactions. Moreover, children with ASD showed impaired understanding of giving but not taking.

CONCLUSIONS

These results indicate that the basic mechanisms of action prediction are intact in children with ASD whereas there may be deficits in the top-down social processing of the giving gesture.

Direct and Observed Joint Attention Modulate 9-Month-Old Infants' Object Encoding

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.

Encoding interactive scripts at 10 months of age

Understanding action-reaction associations that give origin to interactive scripts (e.g., give-and-take interactions) is essential for appreciating social exchanges. However, studies on infants' action understanding have mainly investigated the case of actions performed by individual agents. Moreover, although extensive literature has explored infants' comprehension of action-effect relationships in object functioning, no study has addressed whether it also plays a role when observing social interactions, an issue we addressed here. In a first study, 10-month-old infants observed short videos of dyadic exchanges. We investigated whether they were able to link specific human gestures directed toward another person to specific vocal reactions in the receiver. We used a double-habituation paradigm in which infants were sequentially habituated to two specific action-reaction associations. In the test phase, infants watched one of the two habituated (Familiar) videos, a video with a reversed action-reaction association (Violation), and a Novel video. Results showed that the infants looked longer at both the Novel and Violation test trials than at the Familiar test trials. In a control study, we show that these results could not be accounted for by associative learning; indeed, learning of the action-reaction association did not occur when the vocalization was not produced by the receiver but only contingent on the agent's action. Thus, we show that 10-month-old infants can encode specific social action-effect relationships during the observation of dyadic interactions and that the interactivity of the social context may be critical to shaping young infants' understanding of others' behaviors.

Mirroring Communicative Actions: Contextual Modulation of Mu Rhythm Desynchronization in Response to the 'Back-Of-Hand' Action in 9-Month-Old Infants

This study measured mu rhythm desynchronization (MRD), while nine-month-old infants observed an agent extend her arm and hand, palm up ('back-of-hand action') either in social (object and recipient present), individual (object present, recipient absent), or social object-absent (recipient present, object absent) situations across two experiments. In addition, infants' MRD was measured as they reached for objects. Results revealed significant mu desynchronization in the right centro-parietal region selectively for the social group, indicating that infants processed the back-of-hand action as an object-directed request. Findings suggest to extend the action reconstruction account to object-directed communicative actions as well.

Meaning before grammar: A review of ERP experiments on the neurodevelopmental origins of semantic processing

According to traditional linguistic theories, the construction of complex meanings relies firmly on syntactic structure-building operations. Recently, however, new models have been proposed in which semantics is viewed as being partly autonomous from syntax. In this paper, we discuss some of the developmental implications of syntax-based and autonomous models of semantics. We review event-related brain potential (ERP) studies on semantic processing in infants and toddlers, focusing on experiments reporting modulations of N400 amplitudes using visual or auditory stimuli and different temporal structures of trials. Our review suggests that infants can relate or integrate semantic information from temporally overlapping stimuli across modalities by 6 months of age. The ability to relate or integrate semantic information over time, within and across modalities, emerges by 9 months. The capacity to relate or integrate information from spoken words in sequences and sentences appears by 18 months. We also review behavioral and ERP studies showing that grammatical and syntactic processing skills develop only later, between 18 and 32 months. These results provide preliminary evidence for the availability of some semantic processes prior to the full developmental emergence of syntax: non-syntactic meaning-building operations are available to infants, albeit in restricted ways, months before the abstract machinery of grammar is in place. We discuss this hypothesis in light of research on early language acquisition and human brain development.

Becoming better together: The early development of interpersonal coordination

Crucial for interacting successfully with other people is the ability to coordinate one's actions with those of others. Interpersonal coordination can be planned or emergent (spontaneous). Although typically easy for adults, coordinating successfully and smoothly with others may be far from trivial for infants and toddlers. What do we know about the developmental trajectory of interpersonal coordination in the first years of life? Which processes play a role in successfully coordinating with others? And how does the development of interpersonal coordination impact other aspects of children's development? In this chapter, we review when and how infants and young children develop successful interpersonal coordination skills (planned and emergent) in early childhood. We argue that insights from the field of cognitive (neuro-) science have significantly advanced our knowledge on which social-cognitive processes underlie interpersonal coordination and its development. In particular, we discuss four important social-cognitive processes; monitoring and predicting others' actions as well as planning and controlling one's own actions. We then present findings on the impact of interpersonal coordination on young children's social understanding, their prosocial behavior and affiliation. Together, we conclude that for future research on the development of interpersonal coordination interdisciplinary exchanges between fields like cognitive (neuro-) science and developmental science offer promising avenues.

The importance of using multiple outcome measures in infant research

Collecting data with infants is notoriously difficult. As a result, many of our studies consist of small samples, with only a single measure, in a single age group, at a single time point. With renewed calls for greater academic rigor in data collection practices, using multiple outcome measures in infant research is one way to increase rigor, and, at the same time, enable us to more accurately interpret our data. Here, we illustrate the importance of using multiple measures in psychological research with examples from our own work on rapid threat detection and from the broader infancy literature. First, we describe our initial studies using a single outcome measure, and how this strategy caused us to nearly miss a rich and complex story about attention biases for threat and their development. We demonstrate how using converging measures can help researchers make inferences about infant behavior, and how using additional measures allows us to more deeply examine the mechanisms that drive developmental change. Finally, we provide practical and statistical recommendations for how researchers can use multiple measures in future work.

The engaging nature of interactive gestures

The social interactions that we experience from early infancy often involve actions that are not strictly instrumental but engage the recipient by eliciting a (complementary) response. Interactive gestures may have privileged access to our perceptual and motor systems either because of their intrinsically engaging nature or as a result of extensive social learning. We compared these two hypotheses in a series of behavioral experiments by presenting individuals with interactive gestures that call for motor responses to complement the interaction ('hand shaking', 'requesting', 'high-five') and with communicative gestures that are equally socially relevant and salient, but do not strictly require a response from the recipient ('Ok', 'Thumbs up', 'Peace'). By means of a spatial compatibility task, we measured the interfering power of these task-irrelevant stimuli on the behavioral responses of individuals asked to respond to a target. Across three experiments, our results showed that the interactive gestures impact on response selection and reduce spatial compatibility effects as compared to the communicative (non-interactive) gestures. Importantly, this effect was independent of the activation of specific social scripts that may interfere with response selection. Overall, our results show that interactive gestures have privileged access to our perceptual and motor systems, possibly because they entail an automatic preparation to respond that involuntary engages the motor system of the observers. We discuss the implications from a developmental and neurophysiological point of view.

The choice is yours: Infants' expectations about an agent's future behavior based on taking and receiving actions

Our social world is rich with information about other people's choices, which subsequently inform our inferences about their future behavior. For individuals socialized within the American cultural context, which places a high value on autonomy and independence, outcomes that are the result of an agent's own choices may hold more predictive value than similar outcomes that are the result of another person's choices. Across two experiments we test the ontogeny of this phenomenon; that is, whether infants are sensitive to the causal history associated with an agent's acquisition of an object. We demonstrate that on average, 12.5-month-old American infants view taking actions as a better indication of an agent's future behavior than are receiving actions. Furthermore, there were significant individual differences in the extent to which infants perceived object receipt to be indicative of future behavior. Specifically, the less autonomous infants were perceived to be (by their parents), socialized to be, and behaved, the more they viewed object receipt as indicative of future behavior. The results are discussed in terms of the role of individual and cultural experience in early understanding of intentional action. (PsycINFO Database Record

The role of head and hand movements for infants' predictions of others' actions

In everyday life, both the head and the hand movements of another person reveal the other’s action target. However, studies on the development of action prediction have primarily included displays in which only hand and no head movements were visible. Given that infants acquire in their first year both the ability to follow other’s gaze and the ability to predict other’s reaching actions, the question is whether they rely mostly on the hand or the head when predicting other’s manual actions. The current study aimed to provide an answer to this question using a screen-based eye tracking setup. Thirteen-month-old infants observed a model transporting plastic rings from one side of the screen to the other side and place them on a pole. In randomized trials the model’s head was either visible or occluded. The dependent variable was gaze-arrival time, which indicated whether participants predicted the model’s action targets. Gaze-arrival times were not found to be different when the head was visible or rendered invisible. Furthermore, target looks that occurred after looks at the hand were found to be predictive, whereas target looks that occurred after looks at the head were reactive. In sum, the study shows that 13-month-olds are capable of predicting an individual’s action target based on the observed hand movements but not the head movements. The data suggest that earlier findings on infants’ action prediction in screen-based tasks in which often only the hands were visible may well generalize to real-life settings in which infants have visual access to the actor’s head.

Infants' Visual Recognition of Pincer Grip Emerges Between 9 and 12 Months of Age

The development of the ability to recognize the whole human body shape has long been investigated in infants, while less is known about their ability to recognize the shape of single body parts, and in particular their biomechanical constraints. This study aimed to explore whether 9- and 12-month-old infants have knowledge of a hand-grasping movement (i.e., pincer grip), being able to recognize violations of the hand's anatomical constraints during the observation of that movement. Using a preferential looking paradigm, we showed that 12-month-olds discriminate between biomechanically possible and impossible pincer grips, preferring the former over the latter (Experiment 1). This capacity begins to emerge by 9 months of age, modulated by infants' own sensorimotor experience with pincer grip (Experiment 2). Our findings indicate that the ability to visually discriminate between pincer grasps differing in their biomechanical properties develops between 9 and 12 months of age, and that experience with self-produced hand movements might help infants in building a representation of the hand that encompasses knowledge of the physical constraints of this body part.

Novel paradigms to measure variability of behavior in early childhood: posture, gaze, and pupil dilation

A central challenge of investigating the underlying mechanisms of and the individual differences in young children's behavior is the measurement of the internal physiological mechanism and the involved expressive emotions. Here, we illustrate two paradigms that assess concurrent indicators of both children's social perception as well as their emotional expression. In one set of studies, children view situations while their eye movements are mapped onto a live scene. In these studies, children's internal arousal is measured via changes in their pupil dilation by using eye tracking technology. In another set of studies, we measured children's emotional expression via changes in their upper-body posture by using depth sensor imaging technology. Together, these paradigms can provide new insights into the internal mechanism and outward emotional expression involved in young children's behavior.

The neural basis of non-verbal communication-enhanced processing of perceived give-me gestures in 9-month-old girls

This study investigated the neural basis of non-verbal communication. Event-related potentials were recorded while 29 nine-month-old infants were presented with a give-me gesture (experimental condition) and the same hand shape but rotated 90°, resulting in a non-communicative hand configuration (control condition). We found different responses in amplitude between the two conditions, captured in the P400 ERP component. Moreover, the size of this effect was modulated by participants’ sex, with girls generally demonstrating a larger relative difference between the two conditions than boys.