Interweaving social and manipulative development in early infancy: Some direction for infant caregiving

Early infancy has been neglect not having the best opportunities to promote social motor and cognitive development. The maturational concept considering young infants as passive beings provide a misguided view of the developmental process. The human infant is an active being from the very beginning of life. In the social and physical world, they can, by observing and imitating, perform complex actions involving different motor behaviours. In the present review we argue that imitation and manipulative actions are integrated in Expressive Action System (Reed, 1996) where baby-caregiver social interaction is the link between the use and exploration of objects in the world. We present evidence that neonatal imitation and manipulation activities are connected and thus, we propose stimulation practices based in seminal experimental designs where infants should be positioned in favourable postures to observe others acting in the world. This will have an impact on the way that early infants understand the social world and the chain of actions possible in this environment.

Did you mean to do that? Infants use emotional communication to infer and re-enact others' intended actions

Infants readily re-enact others' intended actions during the second year of life. However, the role of emotion in appreciating others' intentions and how this understanding develops in infancy remains unstudied. In the present study, 15- and 18-month-old infants observed an experimenter repeatedly attempt but fail to produce a target action on an object and express either frustration or neutral affect after each attempt. Analyses of infants' responses revealed that 18-month-old infants, but not 15-month-olds, produced more target actions in the frustration condition than the neutral condition. These results suggest that infants use emotional communication to disambiguate and re-enact others' intended actions and that this ability develops in the second year of life.

Do Preverbal Infants Understand Discrete Facial Expressions of Emotion?

An ongoing debate in affective science concerns whether certain discrete, “basic” emotions have evolutionarily based signals (facial expressions) that are easily, universally, and (perhaps) innately identified. Studies with preverbal infants (younger than 24 months) have the potential to shed light on this debate. This review summarizes what is known about preverbal infants’ understanding of discrete emotional facial expressions. Overall, while many studies suggest that preverbal infants differentiate positive and negative facial expressions, few studies have tested whether infants understand discrete emotions (e.g., anger vs. disgust). Moreover, results vary greatly based on methodological factors. This review also (a) discusses how language may influence the development of emotion understanding, and (b) proposes a new developmental hypothesis for infants’ discrete emotion understanding.

Fourteen-month-olds selectively search for and use information depending on the familiarity of the informant in both laboratory and home contexts

Infants are selective in their learning from others. However, there is only very limited research on the possible factors that shape this selectivity, especially when it comes to the impact of infants' familiarity with the informant and the context. The current study investigated whether 14-month-olds preferred to receive and use information provided by an unfamiliar informant (experimenter) compared with a familiar informant (parent) and whether this pattern depended on the context (home vs. laboratory). We tested infants either in the laboratory (n = 67) or in their home (n = 70). When both informants presented a novel object with positive or negative emotions, we measured infants' gaze behavior as an indicator for information search. When infants acted on the novel object themselves, we measured their exploratory behavior as an indicator of information use. Results revealed no effect of context on infants' information search and use. Rather, we found that the familiarity of informant had distinct effects on infant attention and object exploration. Namely, infants looked longer at the unfamiliar informant across contexts, but they explored more when the familiar informant presented the object compared with when the unfamiliar informant did so. Thus, during information search, 14-month-olds paid most attention to an unfamiliar source of information. However, participants explored the objects more when they came from a familiar source than when they came from an unfamiliar one. Possible explanations for these findings are discussed.

Differential effects of others' emotional cues on 18-month-olds' preferential reproduction of observed actions

Infants use others' emotional signals to regulate their own object-directed behavior and action reproduction, and they typically produce more actions after having observed positive as compared to negative emotional cues. This study explored infants' understanding of the referential specificity of others' emotional cues when being confronted with two actions that are accompanied by different emotional displays. Selective action reproduction was measured after 18-month-olds (N = 42) had observed two actions directed at the same object, one of which was modeled with a positive emotional expression and the other with a negative emotional expression. Across four trials with different objects, infants' first actions matched the positively-emoted actions more often than the negatively-emoted actions. In comparison with baseline-level, infants' initial performance changed only for the positively-emoted actions, in that it increased during test. Latencies to first object-touch during test did not differ when infants reproduced the positively- or negatively-emoted actions, respectively, indicating that infants related the cues to the respective actions rather than to the object. During demonstration, infants looked relatively longer at the object than at the model's face, with no difference in positive or negative displays. Infants during their second year of life thus capture the action-related referential specificity of others' emotional cues and seem to follow positive signals more readily when actively selecting which of two actions to reproduce preferentially.

Fourteen-Month-Olds Adapt Their Imitative Behavior in Light of a Model’s Constraints

Rather than reenacting every action they observe, preverbal infants adapt their imitative behavior. Although previous studies have revealed the capability of preverbal infants to imitate selectively, the question about the adaptability of this behavior on an individual level did not attract considerable scientific attention until now. In the current study, we investigated whether 14-month-old infants flexibly alternate their imitative response in accordance with a model’s changing physical constraints in a body-part imitation paradigm. Participants were presented with two novel actions whereby a model illuminated a light-box and turned on a sound-box, either by using her forehead (head touch) or by sitting on the apparatus (sit-touch). Each participant observed these tasks in two conditions: once where the model’s hands were occupied and once where her hands were free while executing the head or sit-touch. Participants were more likely to reenact the observed novel behavior when the model had freely chosen to perform it than when she had to do so due to physical constraints. Not only did we replicate a number of previous findings, we show here that preverbal infants adapt their imitative behavior across conditions based on the physical constraints of the model. These results point towards the adaptable nature of imitative behavior also on an individual level. This ability might be one of the building blocks for children for learning their social group’s specific action repertoire.

"Aren't you supposed to be sad?" Infants do not treat a stoic person as an unreliable emoter

The current study examined how 18-month-old infants react to a "stoic" person, that is, someone who displays a neutral facial expression following negative experiences. Infants first watched a series of events during which an actor had an object stolen from her. In one condition, infants then saw the actor display sadness, while she remained neutral in the other condition. Then, all infants interacted with the actor in emotional referencing, instrumental helping, empathic helping, and imitation tasks. Results revealed that during the exposure phase, infants in both groups looked an equal amount of time at the scene and engaged in similar levels of hypothesis testing. However, infants in the sad group expressed more concern toward the actor than those in the neutral group. No differences were found between the two groups on the interactive tasks. This conservative test of selective learning and altruism shows that, at 18 months, infants are sensitive to the valence of emotional expressions following negative events but also consider an actor's neutral expression just as appropriate as a sad expression following a negative experience. These findings represent an important contribution to research on the emergence of selective trust during infancy.

The social life of 'eugh': disgust as assessment in family mealtimes

Disgust is a complex phenomenon that pervades a number of social situations. To date, disgust has primarily been understood as an individually experienced emotion or as a way of defining boundaries between people or objects; the detailed social practices through which disgust is choreographed, however, have yet to be fully explored. The social implications of disgust are particularly apparent when food and eating are involved, as it is in such settings that individuals, objects, and social boundaries coincide. In this paper, I argue that the enactment of disgust is an inherently social event, and that we can evidence it as such through the way in which it is produced and oriented to in everyday interaction. The setting for this paper is family mealtimes, as a situation in which children and parents explore the boundaries of what is, and what is not, disgusting. A large corpus of video and audio recordings of mealtimes in England and Scotland were analysed using a discursive psychological approach, with a focus on explicating the sequential and prosodic features of disgust markers (DMs), such as 'eugh' and 'yuck'. The analysis demonstrates that DMs are typically preceded by a 'noticing' by speakers and that 'eugh' is usually uttered alone and at the start of a turn in talk. It is argued that, regardless of their putative status as emotions or cultural concepts, DMs work as assessments of food and eating practices in everyday interaction. They orient others to a trouble source and attend to people's entitlements to 'know' disgust. The implications for our understanding of disgust as a social psychological concept are further explored.

Acquisition of social referencing via discrimination training in infants

This experiment investigated social referencing as a form of discriminative learning in which maternal facial expressions signaled the consequences of the infant's behavior in an ambiguous context. Eleven 4- and 5-month-old infants and their mothers participated in a discrimination-training procedure using an ABAB design. Different consequences followed infants' reaching toward an unfamiliar object depending on the particular maternal facial expression. During the training phases, a joyful facial expression signaled positive reinforcement for the infant reaching for an ambiguous object, whereas a fearful expression signaled aversive stimulation for the same response. Baseline and extinction conditions were implemented as controls. Mothers' expressions acquired control over infants' approach behavior for all participants. All participants ceased to show discriminated responding during the extinction phase. The results suggest that 4- and 5-month-old infants can learn social referencing via discrimination training.

Rat pup social motivation: a critical component of early psychological development

Examining the role of the offspring in early social dynamics is especially difficult. Human developmental psychology has found infant behavior to be a vital part of the early environmental setting. In the rodent model, the different ways that a rodent neonate or pup can influence social dynamics are not well known. Typically, litters of neonates or pups offer complex social interactions dominated by behavior seemingly initiated and maintained by the primary caregiver (e.g., the dam). Despite this strong role for the caregiver, the young most likely influence the litter dynamics in many powerful ways including communication signals, discrimination abilities and early approach behavior. Nelson and Panksepp (1996) developed a preference task to examine early rodent pup social motivation. We have used the same task to examine how variations in maternal care or different environmental perturbations could alter the rat pup preferences for social-related stimuli. Rat pups receiving low levels of maternal licking and grooming were impaired in maternal odor cue learning and emitted lower levels of 22kHz ultrasounds compared to pups from the high licking and grooming cohort. Prenatal stress or early exposure to a toxicant (polychlorinated biphenyl) altered early social preferences in the rat pup in different ways indicating that diverse strategies are expressed and specific to the type of perturbation exposure. A greater focus on the offspring motivation following early 'stressors' will allow for more complete understanding of the dynamics in behavior during early social development.