Do Infants Recognize Engagement in Social Interactions? The Case of Face-to-Face Conversation

11-month-olds recognize the teacher-student relationship

Understanding how preverbal infants perceive and differentiate the roles of teachers and students can provide profound insights into the early stages of human learning and cognition. We thus developed a paradigm based on the task order and the interactive position to determine if infants understand teacher-student relationships. Five experiments (N = 104), reveal that, after watching the teacher agent instruct the student agent from failure to success, 11-month-old infants looked at the teacher for a longer time when they watched a new naïve agent seek information in a new ambiguous scenario. Three additional control experiments excluded alternative interpretations of infants' selective looking, suggesting that agents' order-related actions influenced infants' identification. Another control experiment demonstrated the importance of the position when the teacher and the student had interactive exchanges. These findings indicate that preverbal infants can recognize the teacher-student relationship, which is crucial to accessing effective information in early life.

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.

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.

Do face-to-face interactions support 6-month-olds' understanding of the communicative function of speech?

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.

Observing Third-Party Attentional Relationships Affects Infants' Gaze Following: An Eye-Tracking Study

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.