Abstract thematic roles in infants' representation of social events

Infants' thoughts are classically characterized as iconic, perceptual-like representations.1,2,3 Less clear is whether preverbal infants also possess a propositional language of thought, where mental symbols are combined according to syntactic rules, very much like words in sentences.4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17 Because it is rich, productive, and abstract, a language of thought would provide a key to explaining impressive achievements in early infancy, from logical inference to representation of false beliefs.18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31 A propositional language-including a language of thought5-implies thematic roles that, in a sentence, indicate the relation between noun and verb phrases, defining who acts on whom; i.e., who is the agent and who is the patient.32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39 Agent and patient roles are abstract in that they generally apply to different situations: whether A kicks, helps, or kisses B, A is the agent and B is the patient. Do preverbal infants represent abstract agent and patient roles? We presented 7-month-olds (n = 143) with sequences of scenes where the posture or relative positioning of two individuals indicated that, across different interactions, A acted on B. Results from habituation (experiment 1) and pupillometry paradigms (experiments 2 and 3) demonstrated that infants showed surprise when roles eventually switched (B acted on A). Thus, while encoding social interactions, infants fill in an abstract relational structure that marks the roles of agent and patient and that can be accessed via different event scenes and properties of the event participants (body postures or positioning). This mental process implies a combinatorial capacity that lays the foundations for productivity and compositionality in language and cognition.

Invariant representations in abstract concept grounding - the physical world in grounded cognition

Grounded cognition states that mental representations of concepts consist of experiential aspects. For example, the concept "cup" consists of the sensorimotor experiences from interactions with cups. Typical modalities in which concepts are grounded are: The sensorimotor system (including interoception), emotion, action, language, and social aspects. Here, we argue that this list should be expanded to include physical invariants (unchanging features of physical motion; e.g., gravity, momentum, friction). Research on physical reasoning consistently demonstrates that physical invariants are represented as fundamentally as other grounding substrates, and therefore should qualify. We assess several theories of concept representation (simulation, conceptual metaphor, conceptual spaces, predictive processing) and their positions on physical invariants. We find that the classic grounded cognition theories, simulation and conceptual metaphor theory, have not considered physical invariants, while conceptual spaces and predictive processing have. We conclude that physical invariants should be included into grounded cognition theories, and that the core mechanisms of simulation and conceptual metaphor theory are well suited to do this. Furthermore, conceptual spaces and predictive processing are very promising and should also be integrated with grounded cognition in the future.

A stochastic world model on gravity for stability inference

The fact that objects without proper support will fall to the ground is not only a natural phenomenon, but also common sense in mind. Previous studies suggest that humans may infer objects' stability through a world model that performs mental simulations with a priori knowledge of gravity acting upon the objects. Here we measured participants' sensitivity to gravity to investigate how the world model works. We found that the world model on gravity was not a faithful replica of the physical laws, but instead encoded gravity's vertical direction as a Gaussian distribution. The world model with this stochastic feature fit nicely with participants' subjective sense of objects' stability and explained the illusion that taller objects are perceived as more likely to fall. Furthermore, a computational model with reinforcement learning revealed that the stochastic characteristic likely originated from experience-dependent comparisons between predictions formed by internal simulations and the realities observed in the external world, which illustrated the ecological advantage of stochastic representation in balancing accuracy and speed for efficient stability inference. The stochastic world model on gravity provides an example of how a priori knowledge of the physical world is implemented in mind that helps humans operate flexibly in open-ended environments.

Toward Improving the Generation Quality of Autoregressive Slot VAEs

Unconditional scene inference and generation are challenging to learn jointly with a single compositional model. Despite encouraging progress on models that extract object-centric representations ("slots") from images, unconditional generation of scenes from slots has received less attention. This is primarily because learning the multiobject relations necessary to imagine coherent scenes is difficult. We hypothesize that most existing slot-based models have a limited ability to learn object correlations. We propose two improvements that strengthen object correlation learning. The first is to condition the slots on a global, scene-level variable that captures higher-order correlations between slots. Second, we address the fundamental lack of a canonical order for objects in images by proposing to learn a consistent order to use for the autoregressive generation of scene objects. Specifically, we train an autoregressive slot prior to sequentially generate scene objects following a learned order. Ordered slot inference entails first estimating a randomly ordered set of slots using existing approaches for extracting slots from images, then aligning those slots to ordered slots generated autoregressively with the slot prior. Our experiments across three multiobject environments demonstrate clear gains in unconditional scene generation quality. Detailed ablation studies are also provided that validate the two proposed improvements.

The language-of-thought as a working hypothesis for developmental cognitive science

A science of prelinguistic infant cognition must take seriously the language-of-thought (LoT) hypothesis. I show how the LoT framework enables us to identify the representational and computational capacities of infant minds and the developmental factors that act on these capacities, and explain how Quilty-Dunn et al.'s take on LoT has important upshots for developmental theory-building.

The Development of Flexible Problem Solving: An Integrative Approach

Flexible problem solving, the ability to deal with currently goal-irrelevant information that may have been goal-relevant in previous, similar situations, plays a prominent role in cognitive development and has been repeatedly investigated in developmental research. However, this research, spanning from infancy to the school years, lacks a unifying framework, obscuring the developmental timing of flexible problem solving. Therefore, in this review paper, previous findings are gathered, organized, and integrated under a common framework to unveil how and when flexible problem solving develops. It is showed that the development of flexible problem solving coincides with increases in executive functions, that is, inhibition, working memory and task switching. The analysis of previous findings shows that dealing with goal-irrelevant, non-salient information received far more attention than generalizing in the presence of goal-irrelevant, salient information. The developmental timing of the latter can only be inferred from few transfer studies, as well as executive functions, planning and theory of mind research, to highlight gaps in knowledge and sketch out future research directions. Understanding how transfer in the presence of seemingly relevant but truly irrelevant information develops has implications for well-balanced participation in information societies, early and lifespan education, and investigating the evolutionary trajectory of flexible problem solving.

Exploring individual differences in infants' looking preferences for impossible events: The Early Multidimensional Curiosity Scale

Infants are drawn to events that violate their expectations about the world: they look longer at physically impossible events, such as when a car passes through a wall. Here, we examined whether individual differences in infants' visual preferences for physically impossible events reflect an early form of curiosity, and asked whether caregivers' behaviors, parenting styles, and everyday routines relate to these differences. In Study 1, we presented infants (N = 47, Mage  = 16.83 months, range = 10.29-24.59 months) with events that violated physical principles and closely matched possible events. We measured infants' everyday curiosity and related experiences (i.e., caregiver curiosity-promoting activities) through a newly developed curiosity scale, The Early Multidimensional Curiosity Scale (EMCS). Infants' looking preferences for physically impossible events were positively associated with their score on the EMCS, but not their temperament, vocabulary, or caregiver trait curiosity. In Study 2A, we set out to better understand the relation between the EMCS and infants' looking preferences for physically impossible events by assessing the underlying structure of the EMCS with a larger sample of children (N = 211, Mage  = 47.63 months, range = 10.29-78.97 months). An exploratory factor analysis revealed that children's curiosity was comprised four factors: Social Curiosity, Broad Exploration, Persistence, and Information-Seeking. Relatedly, caregiver curiosity-promoting activities were composed of five factors: Flexible Problem-Solving, Cognitive Stimulation, Diverse Daily Activities, Child-Directed Play, and Awe-Inducing Activities. In Study 2B (N = 42 infants from Study 1), we examined which aspects of infant curiosity and caregiver behavior predicted infants' looking preferences using the factor structures of the EMCS. Findings revealed that infants' looking preferences were uniquely related to infants' Broad Exploration and caregivers' Awe-Inducing Activities (e.g., nature walks with infants, museum outings). These exploratory findings indicate that infants' visual preferences for physically impossible events may reflect an early form of curiosity, which is related to the curiosity-stimulating environments provided by caregivers. Moreover, this work offers a new comprehensive tool, the Early Multidimensional Curiosity Scale, that can be used to measure both curiosity and factors related to its development, starting in infancy and extending into childhood.

Intuitions about magic track the development of intuitive physics

Many successful magic tricks violate our assumptions about how physical objects behave, but some magic tricks are better than others. We examined whether the interest adults express in a magic trick is predicted by the age at which infants first respond to violation of the corresponding physical principle. In Experiment 1, adults (N = 319) rated their interest in magic tricks mimicking stimuli from violation-of-expectation experiments with infants. We found a clear correlation between how interesting a trick is and the age at which infants demonstrate a sensitivity to its underlying principle. In a second experiment (N = 350), we replicated this finding and also used three additional tricks for which there is no established age of acquisition to predict the age at which those physical principles might be acquired. A third experiment (N = 368) replicated these findings measuring adults' surprise at physical violations rather than their interest in magic tricks. Our results suggest that adults' intuitions reflect the development of physical knowledge and show how magic can reveal our expectations about the physical world.

Developing an Understanding of Science

Young children are adept at several types of scientific reasoning, yet older children and adults have difficulty mastering formal scientific ideas and practices. Why do “little scientists” often become scientifically illiterate adults? We address this question by examining the role of intuition in learning science, both as a body of knowledge and as a method of inquiry. Intuition supports children's understanding of everyday phenomena but conflicts with their ability to learn physical and biological concepts that defy firsthand observation, such as molecules, forces, genes, and germs. Likewise, intuition supports children's causal learning but provides little guidance on how to navigate higher-order constraints on scientific induction, such as the control of variables or the coordination of theory and data. We characterize the foundations of children's intuitive understanding of the natural world, as well as the conceptual scaffolds needed to bridge these intuitions with formal science.

Making Sense of Infants' Differential Responses to Incongruity

Infants show strikingly different reactions to incongruity: looking (Baillargeon, 1998) or smiling (Mireault & Reddy, 2016). The former occurs in response to magical events and the latter to humorous events. We argue that these reactions depend largely on the respective experimental methodologies employed, including the popular Violation of Expectation (VOE) paradigm. Although both types of studies involve infants' reactions to incongruity, their literatures have yet to confront each other and researchers in each domain are drawing strikingly different conclusions regarding infants' understanding of the world. Here, we argue that infants are sensitive to and constrained by several contextual differences in the methodologies employed by incongruity researchers that afford one or the other reaction. We apply De Jaegher & Di Paolo's (2007) Participatory Sense Making framework to further understand what infants are sensitive to in these paradigms. Understanding infants' reactions to incongruity (i.e., VOE) is necessary to clear up claims regarding the sophisticatication of their knowledge of physical and social phenomena. Attention to several simple methodological details is recommended.

Making Sense of the World: Infant Learning From a Predictive Processing Perspective

For human infants, the first years after birth are a period of intense exploration-getting to understand their own competencies in interaction with a complex physical and social environment. In contemporary neuroscience, the predictive-processing framework has been proposed as a general working principle of the human brain, the optimization of predictions about the consequences of one's own actions, and sensory inputs from the environment. However, the predictive-processing framework has rarely been applied to infancy research. We argue that a predictive-processing framework may provide a unifying perspective on several phenomena of infant development and learning that may seem unrelated at first sight. These phenomena include statistical learning principles, infants' motor and proprioceptive learning, and infants' basic understanding of their physical and social environment. We discuss how a predictive-processing perspective can advance the understanding of infants' early learning processes in theory, research, and application.

Illuminating the Dark Ages: Pupil Dilation as a Measure of Expectancy Violation Across the Life Span

Mainly for methodological reasons, little is known about the course of development of early cognitive competencies diagnosed with the violation of expectation (VoE) method in infants. The goal of this research was to evaluate the use of pupillometry as a unified approach to assess expectancy violations during and beyond the "dark ages" between 1 and 3 years. We tested children aged 1-6 years and adults (N = 279) with pictures of animals combined with matching or mismatching animal sounds. All age groups exhibited significantly greater pupil dilation in mismatched than matched trials. We conclude that pupillometry is a viable alternative to the VoE method that, by contrast to the latter, can be used throughout the life span.

The Embodied God: Core Intuitions About Person Physicality Coexist and Interfere With Acquired Christian Beliefs About God, the Holy Spirit, and Jesus

Why are disembodied extraordinary beings like gods and spirits prevalent in past and present theologies? Under the intuitive Cartesian dualism hypothesis, this is because it is natural to conceptualize of minds as separate from bodies; under the counterintuitiveness hypothesis, this is because beliefs in minds without bodies are unnatural-such beliefs violate core knowledge intuitions about person physicality and consequently have a social transmission advantage. We report on a critical test of these contrasting hypotheses. Prior research found that among adult Christian religious adherents, intuitions about person psychology coexist and interfere with theological conceptualizations of God (e.g., infallibility). Here, we use a sentence verification paradigm where participants are asked to evaluate as true or false statements on which core knowledge intuitions about person physicality and psychology and Christian theology about God are inconsistent (true on one and false on the other) versus consistent (both true or both false). We find, as predicted by the counterintuitiveness hypothesis but not the Cartesian dualism hypothesis, that Christian religious adherents show worse performance (lower accuracy and slower response time) on statements where Christian theological doctrines about God's physicality (e.g., incorporeality, omnipresence) conflict with intuitions about person physicality. We find these effects for other extraordinary beings in Christianity-the Holy Spirit and Jesus-but not for an ordinary being (priest). We conclude that it is unintuitive to conceptualize extraordinary beings as disembodied, and that this, rather than inherent Cartesian dualism, may explain the prevalence of beliefs in such beings.

What evidence is required to determine whether infants infer the kinship of third parties? A commentary on Spokes and Spelke (2017)

Research into the cognitive capacities of infants has revealed a rich assortment of competencies that help to structure inferences across multiple content domains. Despite these advances, researchers have paid relatively little attention to a domain crucial to social life: kinship. One recent exception is a set of studies by Spokes and Spelke (2017), who report evidence that 15 to 18-month-old infants expect social affiliation between two babies receiving care from the same adult. The experiments reported by Spokes and Spelke raise the key question of whether infants harbor intuitions regarding kinship-and provide tantalizing hints that they do. But determining whether the infant inferences found in these experiments in fact do implicate a kin-specific psychology is not straightforward, as kinship and social group membership overlap. Researchers need a set of criteria for ascertaining whether individuals (preverbal infants in particular but also children and adults alike) infer kinship-the likely genetic relatedness-between agents based on interactions with a common 3rd party and then use this information to guide expectations of behavior. Here, we consider the nature of evidence that would be needed to establish in principle that infants make inferences specific to kinship. In doing so, we link the developmental literature on infant social cognition to adult kin detection research, which has previously grappled with the question of what evidentiary standards reasonably establish the presence of kin-specific inferences. In light of prior empirical and theoretical work, we advance four criteria for establishing the presence of tacit knowledge of kinship, assess the extent to which the studies presented by S&S meet these criteria, and use the criteria to inform and spark directions for future research.

A model for discovering 'containment' relations

Rapid developments in the fields of learning and object recognition have been obtained by successfully developing and using methods for learning from a large number of labeled image examples. However, such current methods cannot explain infants' learning of new concepts based on their visual experience, in particular, the ability to learn complex concepts without external guidance, as well as the natural order in which related concepts are acquired. A remarkable example of early visual learning is the category of 'containers' and the notion of 'containment'. Surprisingly, this is one of the earliest spatial relations to be learned, starting already around 3 month of age, and preceding other common relations (e.g., 'support', 'in-between'). In this work we present a model, which explains infants' capacity of learning 'containment' and related concepts by 'just looking', together with their empirical development trajectory. Learning occurs in the model fast and without external guidance, relying only on perceptual processes that are present in the first months of life. Instead of labeled training examples, the system provides its own internal supervision to guide the learning process. We show how the detection of so-called 'paradoxical occlusion' provides natural internal supervision, which guides the system to gradually acquire a range of useful containment-related concepts. Similar mechanisms of using implicit internal supervision can have broad application in other cognitive domains as well as artificial intelligent systems, because they alleviate the need for supplying extensive external supervision, and because they can guide the learning process to extract concepts that are meaningful to the observer, even if they are not by themselves obvious, or salient in the input.

Violations of Core Knowledge Shape Early Learning

Research on cognitive development has revealed that even the youngest minds detect and respond to events that adults find surprising. These surprise responses suggest that infants have a basic set of "core" expectations about the world that are shared with adults and other species. However, little work has asked what purpose these surprise responses serve. Here we discuss recent evidence that violations of core knowledge offer special opportunities for learning. Infants and young children make predictions about the world on the basis of their core knowledge of objects, quantities, and social entities. We argue that when these predictions fail to match the observed data, infants and children experience an enhanced drive to seek and retain new information. This impact of surprise on learning is not equipotent. Instead, it is directed to entities that are relevant to the surprise itself; this drive propels children-even infants-to form and test new hypotheses about surprising aspects of the world. We briefly consider similarities and differences between these recent findings with infants and children, on the one hand, and findings on prediction errors in humans and non-human animals, on the other. These comparisons raise open questions that require continued inquiry, but suggest that considering phenomena across species, ages, kinds of surprise, and types of learning will ultimately help to clarify how surprise shapes thought.

Accessing the Inaccessible: Redefining Play as a Spectrum

Defining play has plagued researchers and philosophers for years. From describing play as an inaccessible concept due to its complexity, to providing checklists of features, the field has struggled with how to conceptualize and operationalize “play.” This theoretical piece reviews the literature about both play and learning and suggests that by viewing play as a spectrum – that ranges from free play (no guidance or support) to guided play and games (including purposeful adult support while maintaining playful elements), we better capture the true essence of play and explain its relationship to learning. Insights from the Science of Learning allow us to better understand why play supports learning across social and academic domains. By changing the lens through which we conceptualize play, we account for previous findings in a cohesive way while also proposing new avenues of exploration for the field to study the role of learning through play across age and context.

The relationship between pre-verbal event representations and semantic structures: The case of goal and source paths

We explored the nature of infants' concepts for goal path and source path in motion events (e.g., the duck moved into the bowl/out of the bowl), specifically asking how infants' representations could support the acquisition of the semantic roles of goal path and source path in language. The results showed that 14.5-month-old infants categorized goal paths across different motion events (moving to X, moving on Y), and they also categorized source paths if the source reference objects were highly salient (relatively large in size and colorful). Infants at 10months also categorized goal paths, suggesting that the broad concept GOAL PATH precedes the acquisition of the relevant spatial terms (e.g., "to", "onto"). These results are discussed in terms of the nature of goal and source path representations in infancy (e.g., whether they are represented at a general level - one that encompasses specific relations such as containment and support) as well as the possible mechanisms that may be involved in the mapping of these representations to language.

Trading Spaces: Carving up Events for Learning Language

Relational terms (e.g., verbs and prepositions) are the cornerstone of language development, bringing together two distinct fields: linguistic theory and infants’ event processing. To acquire relational terms such as run, walk, in, and on, infants must first perceive and conceptualize components of dynamic events such as containment—support, path—manner, source—goal, and figure—ground. Infants must then uncover how the particular language they are learning encodes these constructs. This review addresses the interaction of language learning with infants’ conceptualization of these nonlinguistic spatial event components. We present the thesis that infants start with language-general nonlinguistic constructs that are gradually refined and tuned to the requirements of their native language. In effect, infants are trading spaces, maintaining their sensitivity to some relational distinctions while dampening other distinctions, depending on how their native language expresses these constructs.

Is God just a big person? Children's conceptions of God across cultures and religious traditions

The present research examines the influence of intuitive cognitive domain and religion on the God concepts of children growing up in religious traditions that present God in ways varying from abstract to concrete. In Study 1, we compared children from a Latter-Day Saints (LDS) background with those from mainstream Christian (MC) backgrounds in the United States. In contrast to MC theology that holds that God is all-knowing, all-powerful, and disembodied, LDS theology depicts God as embodied. In Study 1, 3- to 7-year-olds from LDS and MC backgrounds were asked about supernatural mental and immaterial attributes of God, a ghost, a dad, and a bug. In Study 2, children ages 3-7 from Muslim and Catholic backgrounds in Indonesia were presented with a variant of Study 1. Taken together, the two studies examine the God concepts of children raised in three different religious traditions with God concepts that range from highly abstract to concrete. Overall, we find that the youngest children, regardless of religion, distinguish God from humans and hold similar ideas of God, attributing more supernatural psychological than physical properties. Older children's conceptions of God are more in line with the theological notions of their traditions. The results suggest that children are not simply anthropomorphic in their God concepts, but early on understand supernatural agents as having special mental properties and they continue to learn about differences between agents, influenced by their religious traditions. Statement of contribution What is already known on this subject Research on children's God concepts has established that children begin to distinguish the mind of God from that of humans by around age 4-5. The main debate in the field is whether children start out thinking about God in anthropomorphic terms or whether they start out with an undifferentiated idea of agents' minds as all having access to knowledge. Research on children's understanding of immortality has demonstrated that around the same age that children begin differentiating God's mind from human minds, they also differentiate between the two in terms of life-cycle attributes, attributing immortality to God, but not to humans. What does this study add? The present research contributes to the field by examining the God concepts of children from different religious backgrounds. These religious backgrounds have theologies with God concepts that range from physically concrete (Latter-Day Saints or Mormonism) to highly abstract (Islam). We also include Christian samples for comparison. The present research examines children's attributions to different supernatural agents including God, but also a ghost and an angel. The present studies look at children's attribution of not only supernatural mental attributions, but also the supernatural physical attributions of immateriality and omnipresence that have been understudied.

Core Intuitions About Persons Coexist and Interfere With Acquired Christian Beliefs About God

This study tested the hypothesis that in the minds of adult religious adherents, acquired beliefs about the extraordinary characteristics of God coexist with, rather than replace, an initial representation of God formed by co-option of the evolved person concept. In three experiments, Christian religious adherents were asked to evaluate a series of statements for which core intuitions about persons and acquired Christian beliefs about God were consistent (i.e., true according to both [e.g., "God has beliefs that are true"] or false according to both [e.g., "All beliefs God has are false"]) or inconsistent (i.e., true on intuition but false theologically [e.g., "God has beliefs that are false"] or false on intuition but true theologically [e.g., "All beliefs God has are true"]). Participants were less accurate and slower to respond to inconsistent versus consistent statements, suggesting that the core intuitions both coexisted alongside and interfered with the acquired beliefs (Experiments 1 and 2). In Experiment 2 when responding under time pressure participants were disproportionately more likely to make errors on inconsistent versus consistent statements than when responding with no time pressure, suggesting that the resolution of interference requires cognitive resources the functioning of which decreases under cognitive load. In Experiment 3 a plausible alternative interpretation of these findings was ruled out by demonstrating that the response accuracy and time differences on consistent versus inconsistent statements occur for God-a supernatural religious entity-but not for a natural religious entity (a priest).

Building machines that learn and think like people

Recent progress in artificial intelligence has renewed interest in building systems that learn and think like people. Many advances have come from using deep neural networks trained end-to-end in tasks such as object recognition, video games, and board games, achieving performance that equals or even beats that of humans in some respects. Despite their biological inspiration and performance achievements, these systems differ from human intelligence in crucial ways. We review progress in cognitive science suggesting that truly human-like learning and thinking machines will have to reach beyond current engineering trends in both what they learn and how they learn it. Specifically, we argue that these machines should (1) build causal models of the world that support explanation and understanding, rather than merely solving pattern recognition problems; (2) ground learning in intuitive theories of physics and psychology to support and enrich the knowledge that is learned; and (3) harness compositionality and learning-to-learn to rapidly acquire and generalize knowledge to new tasks and situations. We suggest concrete challenges and promising routes toward these goals that can combine the strengths of recent neural network advances with more structured cognitive models.

Perceptual learning and face processing in infancy

Configural information (spacing between features) contributes to face-processing expertise in adulthood. We examined whether infants can be "trained" to process this information. In Experiment 1, 3.5-month-olds failed to discriminate changes in the spacing between facial features. However, in Experiments 2 and 3, infants processed the same information after being primed with faces in which the spacing was repeatedly altered. Experiment 4 found that priming was not effective with inverted faces or with faces depicting changes in features but not relations among features, indicating that the priming exhibited in Experiments 2 and 3 was specific to upright faces depicting spacing changes. Thus, even young infants who do not readily process facial configural information can be induced to do so through priming. These findings suggest that learning to encode critical structural information contributes to the development of face processing expertise.

Prelinguistic foundations of verb learning: Infants discriminate and categorize dynamic human actions

Action categorization is necessary for human cognition and is foundational to learning verbs, which label categories of actions and events. In two studies using a nonlinguistic preferential looking paradigm, 10- to 12-month-old English-learning infants were tested on their ability to discriminate and categorize a dynamic human manner of motion (i.e., way in which a figure moves; e.g., marching). Study 1 results reveal that infants can discriminate a change in path and actor across instances of the same manner of motion. Study 2 results suggest that infants categorize the manner of motion for dynamic human events even under conditions in which other components of the event change, including the actor's path and the actor. Together, these two studies extend prior research on infant action categorization of animated motion events by providing evidence that infants can categorize dynamic human actions, a skill foundational to the learning of motion verbs.

Language Development in the First Year of Life: What Deaf Children Might Be Missing Before Cochlear Implantation

OBJECTIVES

Language development is a multifaceted, dynamic process involving the discovery of complex patterns, and the refinement of native language competencies in the context of communicative interactions. This process is already advanced by the end of the first year of life for hearing children, but prelingually deaf children who initially lack a language model may miss critical experiences during this early window. The purpose of this review is twofold. First, we examine the published literature on language development during the first 12 months in typically developing children. Second, we use this literature to inform our understanding of the language outcomes of prelingually deaf children who receive cochlear implants (CIs), and therefore language input, either before or after the first year.

CONCLUSIONS

During the first 12 months, typically developing infants exhibit advances in speech segmentation, word learning, syntax acquisition, and communication, both verbal and nonverbal. Infants and their caregivers coconstruct a communication foundation during this time, supporting continued language growth. The language outcomes of hearing children are robustly predicted by their experiences and acquired competencies during the first year; yet these predictive links are absent among prelingually deaf infants lacking a language model (i.e., those without exposure to sign). For deaf infants who receive a CI, implantation timing is crucial. Children receiving CIs before 12 months frequently catch up with their typically developing peers, whereas those receiving CIs later do not. Explanations for the language difficulties of late-implanted children are discussed.

Auditory spatial localization: Developmental delay in children with visual impairments

For individuals with visual impairments, auditory spatial localization is one of the most important features to navigate in the environment. Many works suggest that blind adults show similar or even enhanced performance for localization of auditory cues compared to sighted adults (Collignon, Voss, Lassonde, & Lepore, 2009). To date, the investigation of auditory spatial localization in children with visual impairments has provided contrasting results. Here we report, for the first time, that contrary to visually impaired adults, children with low vision or total blindness show a significant impairment in the localization of static sounds. These results suggest that simple auditory spatial tasks are compromised in children, and that this capacity recovers over time.

How Early is Infants' Attention to Objects and Actions Shaped by Culture? New Evidence from 24-Month-Olds Raised in the US and China

Researchers have proposed that the culture in which we are raised shapes the way that we attend to the objects and events that surround us. What remains unclear, however, is how early any such culturally-inflected differences emerge in development. Here, we address this issue directly, asking how 24-month-old infants from the US and China deploy their attention to objects and actions in dynamic scenes. By analyzing infants' eye movements while they observed dynamic scenes, the current experiment revealed striking convergences, overall, in infants' patterns of visual attention in the two communities, but also pinpointed a brief period during which their attention reliably diverged. This divergence, though modest, suggested that infants from the US devoted relatively more attention to the objects and those from China devoted relatively more attention to the actions in which they were engaged. This provides the earliest evidence for strong overlap in infants' attention to objects and events in dynamic scenes, but also raises the possibility that by 24 months, infants' attention may also be shaped subtly by the culturally-inflected attentional proclivities characteristic of adults in their cultural communities.

Keeping Track of Individuals: Insights from Developmental Psychology

According to Mammen and Mironenko (2015) our sensitivity to objects' history (i.e., objects' whereabouts across space and time) has been neglected in much of contemporary psychology. In this paper I present evidence from a developmental psychological perspective indicating that although the terminology is different, some research concerning these important issues has actually been conducted. First, research primarily under the heading 'essentialism' has shown that children are sensitive to at least some aspects of an object's history. Second, research on object individuation has revealed that for infants spatiotemporal information appears to have primacy relative to featural information. Finally, research on episodic development has provided evidence that a continuous (hence historical) sense of 'me' may be a necessary, although not sufficient, precondition in order to have episodic memories. It is argued that the available evidence converges, which only underscores the relevance and importance of the issues raised by Mammen and Mironenko (2015).

Auditory and proprioceptive spatial impairments in blind children and adults

It is not clear what role visual information plays in the development of space perception. It has previously been shown that in absence of vision, both the ability to judge orientation in the haptic modality and bisect intervals in the auditory modality are severely compromised (Gori, Sandini, Martinoli & Burr, 2010; Gori, Sandini, Martinoli & Burr, 2014). Here we report for the first time also a strong deficit in proprioceptive reproduction and audio distance evaluation in early blind children and adults. Interestingly, the deficit is not present in a small group of adults with acquired visual disability. Our results support the idea that in absence of vision the audio and proprioceptive spatial representations may be delayed or drastically weakened due to the lack of visual calibration over the auditory and haptic modalities during the critical period of development.

Establishing Personal Identity in Reincarnation: Minds and Bodies Reconsidered

Little is known about how the minds and bodies of reincarnated agents are represented. In three studies, participants decided which individual, out of multiple contenders, was most likely to be the reincarnation of a deceased person, based upon a single matching feature between the deceased and each of the candidates. While most participants endorsed reincarnation as entailing a new body, they reasoned that candidates with a similar physical mark (e.g., a mole) or a similar episodic autobiographical memory to the deceased, when alive, were more likely than candidates with other physical or psychological based similarities to be the reincarnation of the deceased. As predicted, by increasing the distinctiveness of a matching physical mark and an episodic autobiographical memory, while holding others constant, likelihood judgments for the candidate with the similar distinctive physical mark were significantly higher than candidates with non-distinctive physical marks, but differences between the distinct and general episodic autobiographical memory condition did not reach statistical significance. These findings support the claim that we intuitively represent reincarnated agents as psychologically determined but physically embodied, and that different assumptions underpin the use of physical and psychological features to establish identity in reincarnation contexts.

Refining and expanding the proposal of an inherence heuristic in human understanding

The inherence heuristic is a cognitive process that supplies quick and effortless explanations for a wide variety of observations. Due in part to biases in memory retrieval, this heuristic tends to overproduce explanations that appeal to the inherent features of the entities in the observations being explained (hence the heuristic's name). In this response, we use the commentators' input to clarify, refine, and expand the inherence heuristic model. The end result is a piece that complements the target article, amplifying its theoretical contribution.

Connecting numbers to discrete quantification: a step in the child's construction of integer concepts

The present study asks when young children understand that number words quantify over sets of discrete individuals. For this study, 2- to 4-year-old children were asked to extend the number word five or six either to a cup containing discrete objects (e.g., blocks) or to a cup containing a continuous substance (e.g., water). In Experiment 1, only children who knew the exact meanings of the words one, two and three extended higher number words (five or six) to sets of discrete objects. In Experiment 2, children who only knew the exact meaning of one extended higher number words to discrete objects under the right conditions (i.e., when the problem was first presented with the number words one and two). These results show that children have some understanding that number words pertain to discrete quantification from very early on, but that this knowledge becomes more robust as children learn the exact, cardinal meanings of individual number words.

Domestic violence and the place of fear in mother/baby relationships: "what was I afraid of ? Of making it worse."

It should come as no surprise that when women who have raised babies in domestic violence come together to discuss the formation of relationships with their babies they raise issues of fear. Yet in current attachment studies about the formation of relationships between women and their babies, knowledge of fear based in lived experiences is undervalued. This article draws on a qualitative study of such experiences to explore ways in which fear impacted on 16 women and their babies. From this study it is discerned that fear impacts in diverse ways on women, babies, and their relationships with each other. Women's experiences show that fear is a complex emotion that cannot be understood outside of context, relations, and subjectivity. Furthermore, fear can be the motivation for protection, whereby actions by women are in the interests of safety of their babies. These insights look beyond attachment theory to the manifestations of and responses to fear identified by women who have raised babies while enduring domestic violence.

Understanding goal-directed human actions and physical causality: the role of mother-infant interaction

This study addresses the relation between early cognitive development and mother-infant interaction. Infants at the age of 6 and 10 months recruited from labs in three European countries--Germany, Great Britain, and France--were tested on two cognitive tasks: understanding of goal-directed human action and physical causality. Mother-infant interaction was assessed with the CARE-Index. In the goal-directed action task, the overall sample of the 6-month olds did not yet reliably discriminate between an object-change and a path-change trial while a subsample of infants of modestly controlling mothers did. All infants at 10 months of age showed discrimination. In the physical causality task, the overall sample of the 6-month olds did not yet reliably discriminate between an expected and an unexpected launching event. At 10 months of age, the overall sample showed discrimination, due to the major subsample of infants of highly sensitive mothers. Our findings support the view that exogenous factors influence cognitive development within a particular time window, in highly specific ways, depending on the age of the subjects, the cognitive domain, and the quality of mother-infant interaction.

The role of motor experience in understanding action function: the case of the precision grasp

Recent evidence suggests adults and infants selectively attend to features of action, such as how a hand contacts an object. The current research investigated whether this bias stems from infants' processing of the functional consequences of grasps: understanding that different grasps afford different future actions. A habituation paradigm assessed 10-month-old infants' (N = 62) understanding of the functional consequences of precision and whole-hand grasps in others' actions, and infants' own precision grasping abilities were also assessed. The results indicate infants understood the functional consequences of another's grasp only if they could perform precision grasps themselves. These results highlight a previously unknown aspect of early action understanding, and deepen our understanding of the relation between motor experience and cognition.

Find your manners: how do infants detect the invariant manner of motion in dynamic events?

To learn motion verbs, infants must be sensitive to the specific event features lexicalized in their language. One event feature important for the acquisition of English motion verbs is the manner of motion. This article examines when and how infants detect manners of motion across variations in the figure's path. Experiment 1 shows that 13- to 15-month-olds (N = 30) can detect an invariant manner of motion when the figure's path changes. Experiment 2 reveals that reducing the complexity of the events, by dampening the figure's path, helps 10- to 12-month-olds (N = 19) detect the invariant manner. These findings suggest that: (a) infants notice event features lexicalized in English motion verbs, and (b) attention to manner can be promoted by reducing event complexity.

Remembering kinds: new evidence that categories are privileged in children's thinking

What are the representations and learning mechanisms that underlie conceptual development? The present research provides evidence in favor of the claim that this process is guided by an early-emerging predisposition to think and learn about abstract kinds. Specifically, three studies (N=192) demonstrated that 4- to 7-year-old children have better recall for novel information about kinds (e.g., that dogs catch a bug called "fep") than for similar information about individuals (e.g., that a particular dog catches a bug called "fep"). By showing that children are particularly likely to retain information about kinds, this work not only provides a first empirical demonstration of a phenomenon that may be key to conceptual development but also makes it apparent that young children's thinking is suffused with abstractions rather than being perceptually-based and concrete.

Infants make quantity discriminations for substances

Infants can track small groups of solid objects, and infants can respond when these quantities change. But earlier work is equivocal about whether infants can track continuous substances, such as piles of sand. Experiment 1 (N = 88) used a habituation paradigm to show infants can register changes in the size of piles of sand that they see poured from a container when there is a 1-to-4 ratio. Experiment 2 (N = 82) tested whether infants could discriminate a 1-to-2 ratio. The results demonstrate that females could discriminate the difference but males could not. These findings constitute the youngest evidence of successful quantity discriminations for a noncohesive substance and begin to characterize the nature of the representation for noncohesive entities.