Sequential learning of emotional faces is statistical at 12 months of age

Visual statistical learning in preverbal infants at a higher likelihood of autism and its association with later social communication skills

Visual statistical Learning (SL) allows infants to extract the statistical relationships embedded in a sequence of elements. SL plays a crucial role in language and communication competencies and has been found to be impacted in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). This study aims to investigate visual SL in infants at higher likelihood of developing ASD (HL-ASD) and its predictive value on autistic-related traits at 24-36 months. At 6 months of age, SL was tested using a visual habituation task in HL-ASD and neurotypical (NT) infants. All infants were habituated to a visual sequence of shapes containing statistically predictable patterns. In the test phase, infants viewed the statistically structured, familiar sequence in alternation with a novel sequence that did not contain any statistical information. HL-ASD infants were then evaluated at 24-36 months to investigate the associations between visual SL and ASD-related traits. Our results showed that NT infants were able to learn the statistical structure embedded in the visual sequences, while HL-ASD infants showed different learning patterns. A regression analysis revealed that SL ability in 6-month-old HL-ASD infants was related to social communication and interaction abilities at 24-36 months of age. These findings indicate that early differences in learning visual statistical patterns might contribute to later social communication skills.

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.

You can't play with us: First-person ostracism affects infants' behavioral reactivity

Ostracism negatively affects fundamental psychological needs, induces physiological and behavioral changes, and modulates the processing of social information in adults. Yet little is known about children and preverbal infants' responses to first-person experiences of ostracism. The current study aimed to explore the efficacy of a triadic ball-tossing game in manipulating social inclusion and ostracism with 13-month-old infants (N = 84; 44% males; mostly White; tested from 2019 to 2022) by developing an observational coding system. Infants' behaviors were recorded while participating in a ball-tossing game where they were either included or ostracized from the game. Ostracized, but not included, infants showed an increase in negative emotionality and involvement behaviors, thus suggesting that behavioral responses to being ostracized emerge early in life.

Calculated Feelings: How Children Use Probability to Infer Emotions

Developing the ability to accurately infer others' emotions is crucial for children's cognitive development. Here, we offer a new theoretical perspective on how children develop this ability. We first review recent work showing that with age, children increasingly use probability to infer emotions. We discuss how these findings do not fit with prominent accounts of how children understand emotions, namely the script account and the theory of mind account. We then outline a theory of how probability allows children to infer others' emotions. Specifically, we suggest that probability provides children with information about how much weight to put on alternative outcomes, allowing them to infer emotions by comparing outcomes to counterfactual alternatives.

Ostracism modulates children's recognition of emotional facial expressions

Ostracism has been shown to induce considerable physiological, behavioral and cognitive changes in adults. Previous research demonstrated its effects on children's cognitive and behavioral abilities, but less is known about its impact on their capacity to recognize subtle variations in social cues. The present study aimed at investigating whether social manipulations of inclusion and ostracism modulate emotion recognition abilities in children, and whether this modulation varies across childhood. To do so, 5- and 10-year-old children participated in a computer-based ball tossing game called Cyberball during which they were either included or ostracized. Then, they completed a facial emotion recognition task in which they were required to identify neutral facial expressions, or varying levels of intensity of angry and fearful facial expressions. Results indicated lower misidentification rates for children who were previously ostracized as compared to children who were previously included, both at 5 and 10 years of age. Moreover, when looking at children's accuracy and sensitivity to facial expressions, 5-year-olds' decoding abilities were affected by the social manipulation, while no difference between included and ostracized participants was observed for 10-year-olds. In particular, included and ostracized 10-year-old children as well as ostracized 5-year-olds showed higher accuracy and sensitivity for expressions of fear as compared to anger, while no such difference was observed for included 5-year-olds. Overall, the current study presents evidence that Cyberball-induced inclusion and ostracism modulate children's recognition of emotional faces.

The role of mother-infant emotional synchrony in speech processing in 9-month-old infants

Rhythmicity characterizes both interpersonal synchrony and spoken language. Emotions and language are forms of interpersonal communication, which interact with each other throughout development. We investigated whether and how emotional synchrony between mothers and their 9-month-old infants relates to infants' word segmentation as an early marker of language development. Twenty-six 9-month-old infants and their German-speaking mothers took part in the study. To measure emotional synchrony, we coded positive, neutral and negative emotional expressions of the mothers and their infants during a free play session. We then calculated the degree to which the mothers' and their infants' matching emotional expressions followed a predictable pattern. To measure word segmentation, we familiarized infants with auditory text passages and tested how long they looked at the screen while listening to familiar versus novel words. We found that higher levels of predictability (i.e. low entropy) during mother-infant interaction is associated with infants' word segmentation performance. These findings suggest that individual differences in word segmentation relate to the complexity and predictability of emotional expressions during mother-infant interactions.

Statistical Learning of Language: A Meta-Analysis Into 25 Years of Research

Statistical learning is a key concept in our understanding of language acquisition. Ample work has highlighted its role in numerous linguistic functions-yet statistical learning is not a unitary construct, and its consistency across different language properties remains unclear. In a meta-analysis of auditory-linguistic statistical learning research spanning the last 25 years, we evaluated how learning varies across different language properties in infants, children, and adults and surveyed the methodological trends in the literature. We found robust learning across stimuli (syllables, words, etc.) in infants, and across stimuli and structures (adjacent dependencies, non-adjacent dependencies, etc.) in adults, with larger effect sizes when multiple cues were present. However, the analysis also showed significant publication bias and revealed a tendency toward using a narrow range of simplified language properties, including in the strength of the transitional probabilities used during training. Bayes factor analyses revealed prevalent data insensitivity of moderators commonly hypothesized to impact learning, such as the amount of exposure and transitional probability strength, which contradict core theoretical assumptions in the field. Methodological factors, such as the tasks used at test, also significantly impacted effect sizes in adults and children, suggesting that choice of task may critically constrain current theories of how statistical learning operates. Collectively, our results suggest that auditory-linguistic statistical learning has the kind of robustness needed to play a foundational role in language acquisition, but that more research is warranted to reveal its full potential.

Emotional Faces Facilitate Statistical Learning

Detecting regularities and extracting patterns is a vital skill to organize complex information in our environments. Statistical learning, a process where we detect regularities by attending to relationships between cues in our environment, contributes to knowledge acquisition across myriad domains. However, less is known about how emotional cues-specifically facial configurations of emotion-influence statistical learning. Here, we tested two pre-registered aims to advance knowledge about emotional signals and statistical learning: (1) we examined statistical learning in the context of emotional compared to non-emotional information, and (2) we assessed how emotional congruency (i.e., whether facial stimuli conveyed the same, or different emotions) influenced regularity extraction. We demonstrated statistical learning in the context of emotional signals. Further, we showed that statistical learning occurs more efficiently in the context of emotional faces. We also established that congruent cues benefited an online measure of statistical learning, but had varied effects when statistical learning was assessed via post-exposure recognition test. The results shed light on how affective signals influence well-studied cognitive skills and address a knowledge gap about how cue congruency impacts statistical learning, including how emotional cues might guide predictions in our social world.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42761-022-00130-9.

Acquiring Complex Communicative Systems: Statistical Learning of Language and Emotion

During the early postnatal years, most infants rapidly learn to understand two naturally evolved communication systems: language and emotion. While these two domains include different types of content knowledge, it is possible that similar learning processes subserve their acquisition. In this review, we compare the learnable statistical regularities in language and emotion input. We then consider how domain-general learning abilities may underly the acquisition of language and emotion, and how this process may be constrained in each domain. This comparative developmental approach can advance our understanding of how humans learn to communicate with others.