Infants' perseverative search errors are induced by pragmatic misinterpretation

Children's Selective Teaching and Informing: A Meta-Analysis

Empirical studies on selective teaching and informing indicate that children may vary what they teach depending on whom they are teaching, taking into account how helpful the information is for a given audience. The current meta-analysis quantifies the effect of selective informing and teaching in 2-7-year-olds by examining the relationship between the helpfulness of the information and the frequency of information transmission. Through a systematic search that yielded 1483 results, 28 studies (104 effect sizes, N = 2716) met the inclusion criteria. Using robust variance estimation, we found a medium average effect, Hedges' g = 0.578, 95% CI (0.331, 0.825), suggesting that children selectively share information based on its perceived helpfulness to the listener. Moderator analyses revealed that age and communicative context were significant factors. Children were more informative in their communication when asked to teach compared to other, nonpedagogical prompts. This finding supports and extends natural pedagogy theory-young children not only interpret pedagogical information differently than information acquired through other means, but they are more selective in their informing when teaching. Additionally, we observed a key developmental progression at age 4. Four- to 7-year-olds, but not 2-3-year-olds, selectively shared information that was most helpful for a given learner. This coincides with the development of false-belief understanding, which undergoes significant development at around age 4. Taken together, the present synthesis suggests that young children actively engage in selective social learning from both sides, that of beneficiaries and benefactors of valuable information.

You talkin' to me? Functional breed selection may have fundamentally influenced dogs' sensitivity to human verbal communicative cues

BACKGROUND

The ability to learn from humans via observation was considered to be equally present across properly socialized dogs. We showed recently that cooperative working breeds learned from a human demonstrator more effectively. We hypothesized that functional breed selection could affect sensitivity to human attention-eliciting behavior. Accordingly, we ran the first ever study on dogs that compared the effect of ostensive and neutral verbal communication in a social learning scenario. We used the detour paradigm around a transparent V-shaped fence with either ostensive (addressing the receiver both with words and specific, attention-eliciting prosody) or neutral speech (monotonous reciting of a short poem) demonstration. The other features (gestures, movement) of the demonstration sequence were kept identical between the two conditions. We tested (N = 70) companion dogs from 17 cooperative and 16 independent breeds in three 1-min trials. Subjects had to obtain the reward by detouring around the fence.

RESULTS

Detour latencies of the cooperative dogs improved after both ostensive and neutral speech demonstrations. The independent dogs did not improve their detour latency in either of the conditions. Remarkably, ostensive verbal utterances elicited longer relative looking time towards the demonstrator, cooperative dogs looked longer at the demonstrator, and longer looking time resulted in more successful detours.

CONCLUSIONS

Our study provides the first indication that functional breed selection had a significant impact on dogs' sensitivity to ostensive human communication, which, apart from being crucially important for social learning from humans, until now was considered as a uniformly present heritage of domestication in dogs.

Four-Year-Olds Share General Knowledge and Use Generic Language When Teaching

Young children's receptiveness to teaching is unquestioned, but their understanding of pedagogy has only begun to be explored. Two experiments (N = 90; 45 female) with 4-year-olds from racially and ethnically diverse backgrounds were conducted to test if they exchange general information and use generic language when teaching. Children in both experiments taught more general than episodic information and used more generic than episodic language when teaching. Experiment 2 showed that children did not prefer to report general information or use generic language in a non-pedagogical context. The findings suggest that by 4 years old, children understand that the goal of teaching is to transmit general knowledge.

Development of directed global inhibition, competitive inhibition and behavioural inhibition during the transition between infancy and toddlerhood

Inhibitory control (IC) is a core executive function integral to self-regulation and cognitive control, yet is itself multi-componential. Directed global inhibition entails stopping an action on demand. Competitive inhibition is engaged when an alternative response must also be produced. Related, but not an executive function, is temperamentally-driven wariness of novelty, known as behavioural inhibition. Understanding early development of these components has been hampered by a shortage of suitable measures. We combine established and novel measures to capture directed global inhibition (Toy Prohibition, Touchscreen Prohibition), competitive inhibition (A-not-B, Early Childhood Inhibitory Touchscreen Task; ECITT) and behavioural inhibition (Touchscreen Approach) in 113 10- and 16-month-olds (73 seen longitudinally). ECITT performance shows good 1-week test-retest reliability at 10-months (r = 0.30-0.60) but little stability to 16-months. Directed global inhibition performance shows developmental progression but little stability of individual differences from 10 to 16 months. Performance on measures targeting similar IC components shows greater coherence at 16-months (r = 0.23-0.59) compared with 10-months (r = 0.09-0.35). Probing of ECITT condition effects indicates toddlers are more able, compared with infants, to override immediate prepotencies; indicative of increasingly flexible control over behaviour. However, exerting IC over cumulative prepotencies appears just as challenging for toddlers as infants. Exploratory analyses show little evidence for cross-sectional or longitudinal associations between behavioural, directed global and competitive inhibition. In combination, these findings indicate that IC is not yet a stable, unidimensional construct during the transition between infancy and toddlerhood, and highlight the need for careful selection of multiple measures for those interested in capturing early variation in IC.

Episodic-like memory in common bottlenose dolphins

Episodic memory involves the conscious recollection of personally experienced events, which has often been argued to be a uniquely human ability.^1-5 However, evidence for conscious episodic recall in humans is centered around language-based reports. With no agreed upon non-linguistic behavioral makers of consciousness,⁶ episodic-like memory⁷ therefore represents the behavioral characteristics of human episodic memory, in the absence of evidence for subjective experience during recall. Here, we provide compelling evidence for episodic-like memory in common bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus), based on the incidental encoding and unexpected question paradigm.⁸ This methodology aims to capture the incidental encoding characteristic of human episodic memory, in that when we recall an experience, we remember information that was trivial at the time of encoding, but was encoded automatically.⁹ We show that dolphins are able to use incidentally encoded spatial ("where") and social ("who") information to solve an unexpected memory task, using only a single test trial per test type, which ensured that the dolphins did not have the opportunity to semantically learn "rules" to pass the test. All participating dolphins made correct choices in both the "where" and "who" tests. These results suggest that dolphins are capable of encoding, recalling, and accessing incidental information within remembered events, which is an ability indicative of episodic memory in humans. We argue that the complex socio-ecological background of dolphins may have selected for the ability to recall both spatial and social information in an episodic-like manner.

Cognitive flexibility in 12-month-old preterm and term infants is associated with neurobehavioural development in 18-month-olds

There is growing evidence that preterm children are at an increased risk of poor executive functioning, which underlies behavioural and attention problems. Previous studies have suggested that early cognitive flexibility is a possible predictor of later executive function; however, how it develops in infancy and relates to the later neurobehavioural outcomes is still unclear in the preterm population. Here, we conducted a longitudinal study to investigate oculomotor response shifting in 27 preterm and 25 term infants at 12 months and its relationship with general cognitive development and effortful control, which is a temperamental aspect closely associated with executive function, at 18 months. We found that moderate to late preterm and term infants significantly inhibited previously rewarded look responses, while very preterm infants did not show significant inhibition of perseverative looking at 12 months. Moreover, lower inhibition of perseverative looking was significantly associated with lower general cognitive development and attentional shifting at 18 months. These findings suggest that the early atypical patterns of oculomotor response shifting may be a behavioural marker for predicting a higher risk of negative neurobehavioural outcomes, including attention-related problems in preterm children.

All contexts are not created equal: Social stimuli win the competition for organizing reinforcement learning in 9-month-old infants

Previous work has shown that infants as young as 8 months of age can use certain features of the environment, such as the shape or color of visual stimuli, as cues to organize simple inputs into hierarchical rule structures, a robust form of reinforcement learning that supports generalization of prior learning to new contexts. However, especially in cluttered naturalistic environments, there are an abundance of potential cues that can be used to structure learning into hierarchical rule structures. It is unclear how infants determine what features constitute a higher-order context to organize inputs into hierarchical rule structures. Here, we examine whether 9-month-old infants are biased to use social stimuli, relative to non-social stimuli, as a higher-order context to organize learning of simple visuospatial inputs into hierarchical rule sets. Infants were presented with four face/color-target location pairings, which could be learned most simply as individual associations. Alternatively, infants could use the faces or colorful backgrounds as a higher-order context to organize the inputs into simpler color-location or face-location rules, respectively. Infants were then given a generalization test designed to probe how they learned the initial pairings. The results indicated that infants appeared to use the faces as a higher-order context to organize simpler color-location rules, which then supported generalization of learning to new face contexts. These findings provide new evidence that infants are biased to organize reinforcement learning around social stimuli.

Dogs' insensitivity to scaffolding behaviour in an A-not-B task provides support for the theory of natural pedagogy

Executive function plays a critical role in regulating behaviour. Behaviour which directs attention towards the correct solution leads to increased executive function performance in children, but it is unknown how other animals respond to such scaffolding behaviour. Dogs were presented with an A-not-B detour task. After learning to go through gap A to obtain the reward, the barrier was reversed, and the dogs had to inhibit their learned response and enter through gap B on the opposite side. Failure to do so is known as the perseveration error. In test trials, dogs taking part in one of two scaffolding conditions, a pointing condition, where the experimenter pointed to the new gap, and a demonstration condition, where the experimenter demonstrated the new route, were no less likely to commit the perseveration error than dogs in a control condition with no scaffolding behaviour. Dogs' lack of responsiveness to scaffolding behaviour provides little support for suggestions that simple social learning mechanisms explains scaffolding behaviour in humans. Instead, our results suggest that the theory of natural pedagogy extends to the development of executive function in humans. This suggests that human children's predisposition to interpret ostensive-communicative cues as informative may be an innate, species-specific adaptation.

Optimizing imitation: Examining cognitive factors leading to imitation, overimitation, and goal emulation in preschoolers

Humans imitate patently irrelevant actions known as overimitation, and rather than decreasing with age, overimitation increases with age. Whereas most overimitation research has focused on social factors associated with overimitation, comparatively little is known about the cognitive- and task-specific features that influence overimitation. Specifically, developmental contrasts between imitation and overimitation are confounded by the addition of irrelevant actions to causally necessary actions, increasing sequence length, cognitive load, and processing costs-variables known to be age dependent. We constructed a novel puzzle box task such that a four-step imitation, four-step overimitation, and two-step efficient sequence could be demonstrated using the same apparatus on video. In Experiments 1 and 2, 2.5- to 5-year-olds randomly assigned to imitation and overimitation groups performed significantly more target actions than baseline control groups. Rates of imitation and overimitation increased as a function of age, with older preschoolers outperforming younger preschoolers in both conditions. In Experiment 3, preschoolers were shown a video of an efficient two-step demonstration prior to testing. After they responded, they were shown a four-step overimitation video and were tested on the same puzzle box. Children imitated the efficient demonstration, but after watching the overimitation video, they also overimitated the irrelevant actions. Once again, older children overimitated more than younger children. Together, results show that preschoolers are faithful, flexible, and persistent overimitators. The fidelity and flexibility of overimitation are constrained not only by social factors but also by basic cognitive processes that vary across age groups. As these constraints diminish, overimitation and flexible (optimal) imitation increases.

Adaptive rule learning of event sequences during the A-not-B task in 9-month-old infants

Prior work indicates that infants can use social information to organize simple audiovisual inputs into predictable rules by 8 months of age. However, it is unclear whether infants can use social information to organize more complex events into predictable rules that can be used to guide motor action. To examine these issues, we tested 9-month-old infants using a modified version of an A-not-B task, in which hiding event sequences were paired with different experimenters, who could be used to organize the events into rules that guide action. We predicted that infants' reaching accuracy would be better when the experimenter changes when the toy's hiding location changes, relative to when the experimenter stays the same, as this should cue a novel rule used to guide action. Experiments 1 and 2 validated this prediction. Experiment 3 showed that reaching accuracy was better when the toy's hiding location switched but was consistent with the rule associated with the experimenter, relative to when the toy's hiding location repeated but was inconsistent with the rule associated with the experimenter. These data suggest that infants can use the identities of experimenters to organize events into predictable rules that guide action in the A-not-B task.

The evolutionary origins of natural pedagogy: Rhesus monkeys show sustained attention following nonsocial cues versus social communicative signals

The natural pedagogy hypothesis proposes that human infants preferentially attend to communicative signals from others, facilitating rapid cultural learning. In this view, sensitivity to such signals is a uniquely human adaptation and as such nonhuman animals should not produce or utilize these communicative signals. We test these evolutionary predictions by examining sensitivity to communicative cues in 206 rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) using an expectancy looking time task modeled on prior work with infants. Monkeys observed a human actor who either made eye contact and vocalized to the monkey (social cue), or waved a fruit in front of her face and produced a tapping sound (nonsocial cue). The actor then either looked at an object (referential look) or looked toward empty space (look away). We found that, unlike human infants in analogous situations, rhesus monkeys looked longer at events following nonsocial cues, regardless of the demonstrator's subsequent looking behavior. Moreover younger and older monkeys showed similar patterns of responses across development. These results provide support for the natural pedagogy hypothesis, while also highlighting evolutionary changes in human sensitivity to communicative signals.

Cats show an unexpected pattern of response to human ostensive cues in a series of A-not-B error tests

It is an intriguing question whether cats' social understanding capacity, including the sensitivity to ostensive signals (resulting in fast preferential learning of behavioural choices demonstrated by humans), would be comparable to that in dogs. In a series of A-not-B error tests, we investigated whether the ostensive or non-ostensive manner of human communication and the familiarity of the human demonstrator would affect the search error pattern in companion cats. Cats' performance showed an almost completely different distribution of perseverative erring than earlier was shown in dogs and human infants. Cats demonstrated perseverative errors both during ostensive and non-ostensive cueing by the owner and also during non-ostensive cueing by the experimenter. However, unlike prior studies with dogs, they avoided perseverative errors during the experimenter ostensive cueing condition. We assume that the reliance on human ostensive signals may serve different purpose in companion dogs and cats-meanwhile in dogs, human ostension could support fast rule learning, in cats, it may have only a circumstantial attention-eliciting effect. Our results highlight the need of conducting further throughout experiments on the social cognition of cats, based on their own right beside the traditional cat-dog comparative approach.

Do Helpful Mothers Help? Effects of Maternal Scaffolding and Infant Engagement on Cognitive Performance

Infants are highly social and much early learning takes place in a social context during interactions with caregivers. Previous research shows that social scaffolding - responsive parenting and joint attention - can confer benefits for infants' long-term development and learning. However, little previous research has examined whether dynamic (moment-to-moment) adaptations in adults' social scaffolding are able to produce immediate effects on infants' performance. Here we ask whether infants' success on an object search task is more strongly influenced by maternal behavior, including dynamic changes in response behavior, or by fluctuations in infants' own engagement levels. Thirty-five mother-infant dyads (infants aged 10.8 months, on average) participated in an object search task that was delivered in a naturalistic manner by the child's mother. Measures of maternal responsiveness (teaching duration; sensitivity) and infant engagement (engagement score; visual attention) were assessed. Mothers varied their task delivery trial by trial, but neither measure of maternal responsiveness significantly predicted infants' success in performing the search task. Rather, infants' own level of engagement was the sole significant predictor of accuracy. These results indicate that while parental scaffolding is offered spontaneously (and is undoubtedly crucial for development), in this context children's endogenous engagement proved to be a more powerful determinant of task success. Future work should explore this interplay between parental and child-internal factors in other learning and social contexts.

Investigating the social environment of the A-not-B search task

Controversy exists concerning the origins of object permanence, with different measures suggesting different conclusions. Looking measures have been interpreted as evidence for early understanding (Baillargeon, 1987, Developmental Psychology, 23:655), while Piaget (The construction of reality in the child, 1954) interpreted perseverative reaching behaviour on his AB search task to be indicative of limited understanding. However, looking measures are often reported to be an unreliable index of infant expectation (Haith, 1998, Infant Behaviour and Development, 21:167) and reaching behaviour has been explained by many alternative processes (e.g. Smith et al., 1999, Psychological Review, 106:235; Topál et al., 2008, Science, 321:1831). We aimed to investigate whether social looking (Dunn & Bremner, 2017, Developmental Science, 20:e12452; Walden et al., 2007, Developmental Science, 10:654) can be used as a valid measure of infant expectation of object location during the Piagetian AB search task. Furthermore, we aimed to test the social accounts of perseverative reaching by investigating how the direction of experimenter gaze would affect infant search and social behaviour. Infant search and social behaviour was compared on B trials across three different conditions, namely experimenter gaze to midline, location A and location B. Search performance significantly improved when the experimenter looked to location B. Infant social looking indicated that infants expect the object to be found in the location in which they search and are actively seeking information about object location from the experimenter. We conclude that social looking is a valid index of infant expectation that has provided support for the importance of the social environment on the AB search task. This casts doubt on the potential for this task to provide information related to the development of object permanence in infancy.

Young Children Selectively Imitate Models Conforming to Social Norms

This study investigated whether toddlers would selectively imitate a demonstrator who exhibits familiarity with cultural practices in their tool-using habits over a demonstrator who consistently uses tools in an unconventional way. Three-year-old children (n = 45) watched videos depicting two models, one of whom performed tool-using actions in a conventional way, while the other model deviated from social conventions. Then, both models introduced a technique to build a tower (differing in one element). Moreover, the context of the demonstration was also manipulated: in one condition, the models expressed their teaching intentions, while in the other they performed the actions without communicative signals. Children were more willing to copy the actions of the conventionally behaving model, irrespective of the context of the demonstration.

Rapid Infant Prefrontal Cortex Development and Sensitivity to Early Environmental Experience

Over the last fifteen years, the emerging field of developmental cognitive neuroscience has described the relatively late development of prefrontal cortex in children and the relation between gradual structural changes and children's protracted development of prefrontal-dependent skills. Widespread recognition by the broader scientific community of the extended development of prefrontal cortex has led to the overwhelming perception of prefrontal cortex as a "late developing" region of the brain. However, despite its supposedly protracted development, multiple lines of research have converged to suggest that prefrontal cortex development may be particularly susceptible to individual differences in children's early environments. Recent studies demonstrate that the impacts of early adverse environments on prefrontal cortex are present very early in development: within the first year of life. This review provides a comprehensive overview of new neuroimaging evidence demonstrating that prefrontal cortex should be characterized as a "rapidly developing" region of the brain, discusses the converging impacts of early adversity on prefrontal circuits, and presents potential mechanisms via which adverse environments shape both concurrent and long-term measures of prefrontal cortex development. Given that environmentally-induced disparities are present in prefrontal cortex development within the first year of life, translational work in intervention and/or prevention science should focus on intervening early in development to take advantages of this early period of rapid prefrontal development and heightened plasticity.

Self domestication and the evolution of language

We set out an account of how self-domestication plays a crucial role in the evolution of language. In doing so, we focus on the growing body of work that treats language structure as emerging from the process of cultural transmission. We argue that a full recognition of the importance of cultural transmission fundamentally changes the kind of questions we should be asking regarding the biological basis of language structure. If we think of language structure as reflecting an accumulated set of changes in our genome, then we might ask something like, "What are the genetic bases of language structure and why were they selected?" However, if cultural evolution can account for language structure, then this question no longer applies. Instead, we face the task of accounting for the origin of the traits that enabled that process of structure-creating cultural evolution to get started in the first place. In light of work on cultural evolution, then, the new question for biological evolution becomes, "How did those precursor traits evolve?" We identify two key precursor traits: (1) the transmission of the communication system through learning; and (2) the ability to infer the communicative intent associated with a signal or action. We then describe two comparative case studies-the Bengalese finch and the domestic dog-in which parallel traits can be seen emerging following domestication. Finally, we turn to the role of domestication in human evolution. We argue that the cultural evolution of language structure has its origin in an earlier process of self-domestication.

Co-viewing supports toddlers' word learning from contingent and noncontingent video

Social cues are one way young children determine that a situation is pedagogical in nature-containing information to be learned and generalized. However, some social cues (e.g., contingent gaze and responsiveness) are missing from prerecorded video, a potential reason why toddlers' language learning from video can be inefficient compared with their learning directly from a person. This study explored two methods for supporting children's word learning from video by adding social-communicative cues. A sample of 88 30-month-olds began their participation with a video training phase. In one manipulation, an on-screen actress responded contingently to children through a live video feed (similar to Skype or FaceTime "video chat") or appeared in a prerecorded demonstration. In the other manipulation, parents either modeled responsiveness to the actress's on-screen bids for participation or sat out of their children's view. Children then viewed a labeling demonstration on video, and their knowledge of the label was tested with three-dimensional objects. Results indicated that both on-screen contingency and parent modeling increased children's engagement with the actress during training. However, only parent modeling increased children's subsequent word learning, perhaps by revealing the symbolic (representational) intentions underlying this video. This study highlights the importance of adult co-viewing in helping toddlers to interpret communicative cues from video.

A case for methodological overhaul and increased study of executive function in the domestic dog (Canis lupus familiaris)

Executive function (EF) allows for self-regulation of behavior including maintaining focus in the face of distraction, inhibiting behavior that is suboptimal or inappropriate in a given context, and updating the contents of working memory. While EF has been studied extensively in humans, it has only recently become a topic of research in the domestic dog. In this paper, I argue for increased study of dog EF by explaining how it might influence the owner-dog bond, human safety, and dog welfare, as well as reviewing the current literature dedicated to EF in dogs. In "EF and its Application to "Man's Best Friend" section, I briefly describe EF and how it is relevant to dog behavior. In "Previous investigations into EF in dogs" section, I provide a review of the literature pertaining to EF in dogs, specifically tasks used to assess abilities like inhibitory control, cognitive flexibility, and working memory capacity. In "Insights and limitations of previous studies" section, I consider limitations of existing studies that must be addressed in future research. Finally, in "Future directions" section, I propose future directions for meaningful research on EF in dogs.

Gaze-Following and Reaction to an Aversive Social Interaction Have Corresponding Associations with Variation in the OXTR Gene in Dogs but Not in Human Infants

It has been suggested that dogs' remarkable capacity to use human communicative signals lies in their comparable social cognitive skills; however, this view has been questioned recently. The present study investigated associations between oxytocin receptor gene (OXTR) polymorphisms and social behavior in human infants and dogs with the aim to unravel potentially differential mechanisms behind their responsiveness to human gaze. Sixteen-month-old human infants (N = 99) and adult Border Collie dogs (N = 71) participated in two tasks designed to test (1) their use of gaze-direction as a cue to locate a hidden object, and (2) their reactions to an aversive social interaction (using the still face task for children and a threatening approach task for dogs). Moreover, we obtained DNA samples to analyze associations between single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) in the OXTR (dogs: -213AG, -94TC, -74CG, rs8679682, children: rs53576, rs1042778, rs2254298) and behavior. We found that OXTR genotype was significantly associated with reactions to an aversive social interaction both in dogs and children, confirming the anxiolytic effect of oxytocin in both species. In dogs, the genotypes linked to less fearful behavior were associated also with a higher willingness to follow gaze whereas in children, OXTR gene polymorphisms did not affect gaze following success. This pattern of gene-behavior associations suggests that for dogs the two situations are more alike (potentially fear-inducing or competitive) than for human children. This raises the possibility that, in contrast to former studies proposing human-like cooperativeness in dogs, dogs may perceive human gaze in an object-choice task in a more antagonistic manner than children.

Number prompts left-to-right spatial mapping in toddlerhood

Toddlers performed a spatial mapping task in which they were required to learn the location of a hidden object in a vertical array and then transpose this location information 90° to a horizontal array. During the vertical training, they were given (a) no labels, (b) alphabetical labels, or (c) numerical labels for each potential spatial location. After the array was transposed to become a horizontal continuum, the children who were provided with numerical labels during training and those who heard alphabetical labels and formed a strong memory for the vertical location, selectively chose the location corresponding to a left-to-right mapping bias. Children who received no concurrent ordinal labels during training were not able to transpose the array, and did not exhibit any spatial directionality bias after transposition. These results indicate that children exhibit more flexible spatial mapping than other animals, and this mapping is modulated depending on the type of concurrent ordinal information the child receives. (PsycINFO Database Record

Parameterizing developmental changes in epistemic trust

Children rely on others for much of what they learn, and therefore must track who to trust for information. Researchers have debated whether to interpret children's behavior as inferences about informants' knowledgeability only or as inferences about both knowledgeability and intent. We introduce a novel framework for integrating results across heterogeneous ages and methods. The framework allows application of a recent computational model to a set of results that span ages 8 months to adulthood and a variety of methods. The results show strong fits to specific findings in the literature trust, and correctly fails to fit one representative result from an adjacent literature. In the aggregate, the results show a clear development in children's reasoning about informants' intent and no appreciable changes in reasoning about informants' knowledgeability, confirming previous results. The results extend previous findings by modeling development over a much wider age range and identifying and explaining differences across methods.

Infants' motor simulation of observed actions is modulated by the visibility of the actor's body

Previous research suggests that 9-month-old infants will develop a response bias in the A-not-B search paradigm after only observing an experimenter search for a hidden object on A-trials. In the current experiment, we tested whether infants would persist in making errors when only the hands-and-arms of the experimenter were visible. Three different conditions were included: (1) the experimenter was silent while hiding and finding the object, (2) the experimenter communicated with the infant via infant-directed speech, or (3) the body of the experimenter was visible during the training phase before his head and body were occluded during the test phase. Unlike previous studies, the results revealed that a significant proportion of infants searched correctly when the body of the experimenter was not visible, and only the combination of infant-directed speech and familiarization with a fully-specified body resulted in a majority of infants committing search errors. These results are interpreted as suggesting that the likelihood of infants committing search errors is dependent on their motor simulation of the experimenter's reaching. The strength of this simulation is graded by the similarity between the observed action and the motor representation.

Find the Hidden Object. Understanding Play in Psychological Assessments

Standardized psychological assessments are extensively used by practitioners to determine rate and level of development in different domains of ability in both typical and atypical children. The younger the children, the more likely the trials will resemble play activities. However, mode of administration, timing and use of objects involved are constrained. The purpose of this study is to explore what kind of play is play in psychological assessments, what are the expectations about children's performance and what are the abilities supporting the test activities. Conversation Analysis (CA) was applied to the videorecording of an interaction between a child and a practitioner during the administration of the Bayley Scale of Infant and Toddler Development, III edition. The analysis focuses on a 2′07″ long sequence relative to the administration of the test item “Find the hidden object” to a 23 months old child with Down syndrome. The analysis of the sequence shows that the assessor promotes the child's engagement by couching the actions required to administer the item in utterances with marked child-directed features. The analysis also shows that the objects constituting the test item did not suggest to the child a unique course of action, leading to the assessor's modeling of the successful sequence. We argue that when a play frame is activated by an interactional partner, the relational aspect of the activity is foregrounded and the co-player becomes a source of cues for ways in which playing can develop. We discuss the assessment interaction as orienting the child toward a right-or-wrong interpretation, leaving the realm of play, which is inherently exploratory and inventive, to enter that of instructional activities. Finally, we argue that the sequential analysis of the interaction and of the mutual sense-making procedures that partners put in place during the administration of an assessment could be used in the design and evaluation of tests for a finer understanding of the abilities involved.

Preschoolers' Understanding of How Others Learn Through Action and Instruction

It is widely believed that exploration is a mechanism for young children's learning. The present investigation examines preschoolers' beliefs about how learning occurs. We asked 3- to 5-year-olds to articulate how characters in a set of stories learned about a new toy. Younger preschoolers were more likely to overemphasize the role of characters' actions in learning than older children were (Experiment 1, N = 53). Overall performance improved when the stories explicitly stated that characters were originally ignorant and clarified the characters' actions, but general developmental trends remained (Experiment 2, N = 48). These data suggest that explicit metacognitive understanding of the relation between actions and learning is developing during the preschool years, which might have implications for how children learn from exploration.

Applications of Dynamic Systems Theory to Cognition and Development: New Frontiers

A central goal in developmental science is to explain the emergence of new behavioral forms. Researchers consider potential sources of behavioral change depending partly on their theoretical perspective. This chapter reviews one perspective, dynamic systems theory, which emphasizes the interactions among multiple components to drive behavior and developmental change. To illustrate the central concepts of dynamic systems theory, we describe empirical and computational studies from a range of domains, including motor development, the Piagetian A-not-B task, infant visual recognition, visual working memory capacity, and language learning. We conclude by advocating for a broader application of dynamic systems approaches to understanding cognitive and behavioral development, laying out the remaining barriers we see and suggested ways to overcome them.

Social Pre-treatment Modulates Attention Allocation to Transient and Stable Object Properties

Increasing evidence suggests that ostensive-communicative signals in social learning situations enable observers to focus their attention on the intrinsic features of an object (e.g., color) at the expense of ignoring transient object properties (e.g., location). Here we investigated whether off-line social cues, presented as social primes, have the same power to modulate attention allocation to stable and transient object properties as on-line ostensive-communicative cues. The first part of the experiment consisted of a pre-treatment phase, where adult male participants either received intensive social stimulation or were asked to perform non-social actions. Then, they participated in a change detection test, where they watched pairs of pictures depicting an array of five objects. On the second picture, a change occurred compared to the first picture. One object changed either its location (moving forward or backward) or was replaced by another object, and participants were required to indicate where the change had happened. We found that participants detected the change more successfully if it had happened in the location of the object; however, this difference was reduced following a socially intense pre-treatment phase. The results are discussed in relation to the claims of the natural pedagogy theory.

Eye Contact Affects Object Representation in 9-Month-Old Infants

Social cues in interaction with others enable infants to extract useful information from their environment. Although previous research has shown that infants process and retain different information about an object depending on the presence of social cues, the effect of eye contact as an isolated independent variable has not been investigated. The present study investigated how eye contact affects infants' object processing. Nine-month-olds engaged in two types of social interactions with an experimenter. When the experimenter showed an object without eye contact, the infants processed and remembered both the object's location and its identity. In contrast, when the experimenter showed the object while making eye contact with the infant, the infant preferentially processed object's identity but not its location. Such effects might assist infants to selectively attend to useful information. Our findings revealed that 9-month-olds' object representations are modulated in accordance with the context, thus elucidating the function of eye contact for infants' object representation.

Now You See It, Now You Don’t

The cognitive ability of dogs can be assessed using tasks from the human developmental literature. A task that appears to have ecological relevance is the object-permanence task, in which performance hinges on understanding that an object continues to exist once it can no longer be seen. Although dogs are good at visible displacement tasks, in which an object disappears into a container, they can also understand an invisible displacement, in which the container holding the object is moved. Furthermore, we have found that dogs are able to show considerable memory for the invisibly displaced object. We have also found evidence for object permanence in dogs using the violation-of-expectancy procedure, in which subjects look longer at a stimulus that violates expectations (a screen that appears to pass through an object that has been placed behind the screen) than one that does not. Similarly, we have found that dogs look longer at an object that appears to have changed color or size after being placed behind a screen compared to an object that has not changed. Object-permanence tasks provide an ecologically relevant means of evaluating the cognitive development of dogs.

Social Transmission of Experience of Agency: An Experimental Study

The sense of controlling one’s own actions is fundamental to normal human mental function, and also underlies concepts of social responsibility for action. However, it remains unclear how the wider social context of human action influences sense of agency. Using a simple experimental design, we investigated, for the first time, how observing the action of another person or a robot could potentially influence one’s own sense of agency. We assessed how observing another’s action might change the perceived temporal relationship between one’s own voluntary actions and their outcomes, which has been proposed as an implicit measure of sense of agency. Working in pairs, participants chose between two action alternatives, one rewarded more frequently than the other, while watching a rotating clock hand. They judged, in separate blocks, either the time of their own action, or the time of a tone that followed the action. These were compared to baseline judgements of actions alone, or tones alone, to calculate the perceptual shift of action toward outcome and vice versa. Our design focused on how these two dependent variables, which jointly provide an implicit measure of sense of agency, might be influenced by observing another’s action. In the observational group, each participant could see the other’s actions. Multivariate analysis showed that the perceived time of action and tone shifted progressively toward the actual time of outcome with repeated experience of this social situation. No such progressive change occurred in other groups for whom a barrier hid participants’ actions from each other. However, a similar effect was observed in the group that viewed movements of a human-like robotic hand, rather than actions of another person. This finding suggests that observing the actions of others increases the salience of the external outcomes of action and this effect is not unique to observing human agents. Social contexts in which we see others controlling external events may play an important role in mentally representing the impact of our own actions on the external world.

Social Interaction with an "Unidentified Moving Object" Elicits A-Not-B Error in Domestic Dogs

Mechanical “unidentified moving objects” (UMO’s) are useful for controlled investigations into features of social interaction that generate cooperativeness and positive social affiliation in domestic dogs (Canis familiaris). We hypothesized that, if a UMO interacted socially with a dog, the UMO would become associated with certain social cues and would subsequently affect dog behaviour. We assigned dogs to a Human, Social UMO or Non-Social UMO partner. In the Human and Social UMO conditions, the partner interacted with the dog cooperatively whereas the Non-Social UMO partner was unresponsive to the dog’s actions. We then tested dogs with their partner in a Piagetian A-not-B error paradigm, predicting that the Human and Social UMO partners would be more likely to elicit A-not-B errors in dogs than the Non-Social UMO partner. Five trials were conducted in which the dog watched its partner hide a ball behind one of two screens (A or B). As predicted, dogs in the Human and Social UMO conditions were more likely to search for the ball behind the A screen during B trials than dogs in the Non-Social UMO condition. These results reveal that the unfamiliar partner’s social responsiveness leads rapidly to accepting information communicated by the partner. This study has generated a better understanding of crucial features of agents that promote dog social behaviour, which will facilitate the programming of robots for various cooperative tasks.

Naturalistic Developmental Behavioral Interventions: Empirically Validated Treatments for Autism Spectrum Disorder

Earlier autism diagnosis, the importance of early intervention, and development of specific interventions for young children have contributed to the emergence of similar, empirically supported, autism interventions that represent the merging of applied behavioral and developmental sciences. “Naturalistic Developmental Behavioral Interventions (NDBI)” are implemented in natural settings, involve shared control between child and therapist, utilize natural contingencies, and use a variety of behavioral strategies to teach developmentally appropriate and prerequisite skills. We describe the development of NDBIs, their theoretical bases, empirical support, requisite characteristics, common features, and suggest future research needs. We wish to bring parsimony to a field that includes interventions with different names but common features thus improving understanding and choice-making among families, service providers and referring agencies.

Humans but Not Chimpanzees Vary Face-Scanning Patterns Depending on Contexts during Action Observation

Human and nonhuman primates comprehend the actions of other individuals by detecting social cues, including others’ goal-directed motor actions and faces. However, little is known about how this information is integrated with action understanding. Here, we present the ontogenetic and evolutionary foundations of this capacity by comparing face-scanning patterns of chimpanzees and humans as they viewed goal-directed human actions within contexts that differ in whether or not the predicted goal is achieved. Human adults and children attend to the actor’s face during action sequences, and this tendency is particularly pronounced in adults when observing that the predicted goal is not achieved. Chimpanzees rarely attend to the actor’s face during the goal-directed action, regardless of whether the predicted action goal is achieved or not. These results suggest that in humans, but not chimpanzees, attention to actor’s faces conveying referential information toward the target object indicates the process of observers making inferences about the intentionality of an action. Furthermore, this remarkable predisposition to observe others’ actions by integrating the prediction of action goals and the actor’s intention is developmentally acquired.

Feature or location? Infants and adults adopt different strategies to search for a hidden toy in an ambiguous task

Evidence suggests that infants and adults attribute different importance to certain object properties when performing object-directed actions. Namely, infants tend to rely on information about an object's location, whereas adults are more likely to base their actions on its features. In this study, we tested whether the strategic choices of infants (aged 13 months) and adults would be modified by the context of the demonstration. Participants watched as an experimenter hid a ball under one of two different coloured containers, using either a communicative or a non-communicative manner. Then, the locations of the two containers were changed out of sight of the participant. During the test, participants were encouraged to look for the ball under one of the containers. We found that adults were more likely to follow a feature-based strategy than infants. However, there was no effect of the context of the demonstration, suggesting that communication may play different roles in encoding object properties and directing overt behaviour.

Studying social interactions through immersive virtual environment technology: virtues, pitfalls, and future challenges

The goal of the present review is to explain how immersive virtual environment technology (IVET) can be used for the study of social interactions and how the use of virtual humans in immersive virtual environments can advance research and application in many different fields. Researchers studying individual differences in social interactions are typically interested in keeping the behavior and the appearance of the interaction partner constant across participants. With IVET researchers have full control over the interaction partners, can standardize them while still keeping the simulation realistic. Virtual simulations are valid: growing evidence shows that indeed studies conducted with IVET can replicate some well-known findings of social psychology. Moreover, IVET allows researchers to subtly manipulate characteristics of the environment (e.g., visual cues to prime participants) or of the social partner (e.g., his/her race) to investigate their influences on participants’ behavior and cognition. Furthermore, manipulations that would be difficult or impossible in real life (e.g., changing participants’ height) can be easily obtained with IVET. Beside the advantages for theoretical research, we explore the most recent training and clinical applications of IVET, its integration with other technologies (e.g., social sensing) and future challenges for researchers (e.g., making the communication between virtual humans and participants smoother).

Joint action: current perspectives

In recent years researchers have begun to investigate how the perceptual, motor and cognitive activities of two or more individuals become organized into coordinated action. In the first part of this introduction we identify three common threads among the ten papers of this special issue that exemplify this new line of research. First, all of the papers are grounded in the experimental study of online interactions between two or more individuals. Second, albeit at different levels of analysis, the contributions focus on the mechanisms supporting joint action. Third, many of the papers investigate empirically the pre-requisites for the highly sophisticated forms of joint action that are typical of humans. In the second part of the introduction, we summarize each of the papers, highlighting more specific connections among them.

Infants learn enduring functions of novel tools from action demonstrations

According to recent theoretical proposals, one function of infant goal attribution is to support early social learning of artifact functions from instrumental actions, and one function of infant sensitivity to communication is to support early acquisition of generic knowledge about enduring, kind-relevant properties of the referents. The current study tested two hypotheses, derived from these proposals, about the conditions that facilitate the acquisition of enduring functions for novel tools during human infancy. Using a violation-of-expectation paradigm, we show that 13.5-month-old infants encode arbitrary end states of action sequences in relation to the novel tools employed to bring them about. These mappings are not formed if the same end states of action sequences cannot be interpreted as action goals. Moreover, the tool-goal mappings acquired from infant-directed communicative demonstrations are more resilient to counterevidence than those acquired from non-infant-directed presentations and, thus, show similarities to generic representations rather than episodic ones. These findings suggest that the acquisition of tool functions during infancy is guided by both teleological action interpretation mechanisms and the expectation that communicative demonstrations reveal enduring dispositional properties of tools.