Amanda L. Woodward

Infants selectively encode the goal object of an actor's reach

Research with young children has shown that, like adults, they focus selectively on the aspects of an actors behavior that are relevant to his or her underlying intentions. The current studies used the visual habituation paradigm to ask whether infants would similarly attend to those aspects of an action that are related to the actors goals. Infants saw an actor reach for and grasp one of two toys sitting side by side on a curtained stage. After habituation, the positions of the toys were switched and babies saw test events in which there was a change in either the path of motion taken by the actors arm or the object that was grasped by the actor. In the first study, 9-month-old infants looked longer when the actor grasped a new toy than when she moved through a new path. Nine-month-olds who saw an inanimate object of approximately the same dimensions as the actors arm touch the toy did not show this pattern in test. In the second study, 5-month-old infants showed similar, though weaker, patterns. A third study provided evidence that the findings for the events involving a person were not due to perceptual changes in the objects caused by occlusion by the hand. A fourth study replicated the 9 month results for a human grasp at 6 months, and revealed that these effects did not emerge when infants saw an inanimate object with digits that moved to grasp the toy. Taken together, these findings indicate that young infants distinguish in their reasoning about human action and object motion, and that by 6 months infants encode the actions of other people in ways that are consistent with more mature understandings of goal-directed action.

Not All Emotions Are Created Equal: The Negativity Bias in Social-Emotional Development

There is ample empirical evidence for an asymmetry in the way that adults use positive versus negative information to make sense of their world; specifically, across an array of psychological situations and tasks, adults display a negativity bias, or the propensity to attend to, learn from, and use negative information far more than positive information. This bias is argued to serve critical evolutionarily adaptive functions, but its developmental presence and ontogenetic emergence have never been seriously considered. The authors argue for the existence of the negativity bias in early development and that it is evident especially in research on infant social referencing but also in other developmental domains. They discuss ontogenetic mechanisms underlying the emergence of this bias and explore not only its evolutionary but also its developmental functions and consequences. Throughout, the authors suggest ways to further examine the negativity bias in infants and older children, and they make testable predictions that would help clarify the nature of the negativity bias during early development.

Infants’ ability to distinguish between purposeful and non-purposeful behaviors

Prior studies (Gergely et al., 1995; Woodward, 1998) have found that infants focus on the goals of an action over other details. The current studies tested whether infants would distinguish between a behavior that seemed to be goal-directed and one that seemed not to be. Infants in one condition saw an actor grasp one of two toys that sat side by side on a stage. Infants in the other condition saw the actor drop her hand onto one of the toys in a manner that looked unintentional. Once infants had been habituated to these events, they were shown test events in which either the path of motion or the object that was touched had changed. Nine-month-olds differentiated between these two actions. When they saw the actor grasp the toy, they looked longer on trials with a change in goal object than on trials with a change in path. When they saw the actor drop her hand onto the toy, they looked equally at the two test events. These findings did not result from infants being more interested in grasping as compared to inert hands. In a second study, 5-month-old infants showed patterns similar to those seen in 9-month-olds. These findings have implications for theories of the development of the concept of intention. They argue against the claim that infants are innately predisposed to interpret any motion of an animate agent as intentional.

Infants’ developing understanding of the link between looker and object

Three studies investigated infants’ understanding that gaze involves a relation between a person and the object of his or her gaze. Infants were habituated to an event in which an actor turned and looked at one of two toys. Then, infants saw test events in which (1) the actor turned to the same side as during habituation to look at a different toy, or (2) the actor turned to the other side to look at the same toy as during habituation. The first of these involved a change in the relation between actor and object. The second involved a new physical motion on the part of the actor but no change in the relation between actor and object. Seven- and 9-month-old infants did not respond to the change in relation between actor and object, although infants at both ages followed the actor’s gaze to the toys. In contrast, 12-month-old infants responded to the change in the actor‐object relation. Control conditions verified that the paradigm was a sensitive index of the younger infants’ representations of action: 7- and 9-month-olds responded to a change in the actor‐object relation when the actor’s gaze was accompanied by a grasp. Taken together, these findings indicate that gaze-following does not initially go hand in hand with understanding the relation between a person who looks and the object of his or her gaze, and that infants begin to understand this relation between 9 and 12 months.

Infants’ understanding of the point gesture as an object-directed action

Abstract There have been many studies of infants’ propensity to orient in response to a point. However, little is known about infants’ understanding of the relation between a person who points and the referent object. In Study 1, a habituation paradigm was used to assess this understanding in 9- and 12-month-old infants. Infants saw an actor point to one of two toys during habituation, and then saw test events in which either the referent object or path of motion taken by the actor’s arm had changed. Twelve-month-olds looked longer at the former test event than the latter, indicating that they had encoded the relation between the actor and the referent. Nine-month-olds, in contrast, looked equally long at the two test events. Coding of infants’ attentional responses to the points indicated that these results did not derive from the “spotlighting” effects of points. These findings suggest that between 9 and 12 months, infants come to understand pointing as an object-directed action. The results of Study 2 suggest that between these ages, infants’ own use of object-directed points is related to their understanding of the points of others as object-directed.

Infants generate goal-based action predictions

Predicting the actions of others is critical to smooth social interactions. Prior work suggests that both understanding and anticipation of goal-directed actions appears early in development. In this study, on-line goal prediction was tested explicitly using an adaptation of Woodwards (1998) paradigm for an eye-tracking task. Twenty 11-month-olds were familiarized to movie clips of a hand reaching to grasp one of two objects. Then object locations were swapped, and the hand made an incomplete reach between the objects. Here, infants reliably made their first look from the hand to the familiarized goal object, now in a new location. A separate control condition of 20 infants familiarized to the same movements of an unfamiliar claw revealed the opposite pattern: reliable prediction to the familiarized location, rather than the familiarized object. This study suggests that by 11 months infants actively use goal analysis to generate on-line predictions of an agents next action.

The infant origins of intentional understanding

Publisher Summary This chapter highlights distinct hypotheses concerning the origins of intentional understanding and the relation between real-world knowledge and abstract concepts. One hypothesis is that core components of mature knowledge systems are innately specified in the form abstract principles. A second hypothesis is that real-world action knowledge provides the developmental basis for more abstract conceptions of intentional action. Under this view, teaming, cognitive comparison, and conceptual abstraction contribute fundamental structure to intentional understanding. This chapter also reviews that much of the current evidence supports the conclusion that infants begin with relatively local representations of goal-directed action, only later showing signs of more abstract expectations. These findings are mast consistent with the view that infants begin by tracking regularities in real-world actions, including their own, and from these regularities construct more abstract expectations about intentional actions.

Children' s comprehension of deceptive points

This study investigated children’ s ability to comprehend deceptive point gestures. Thirty 3‐ 4 1 2-year-olds participated in a game in which a sticker was hidden under one of two containers. A confederate provided misleading clues about the location of the sticker by either pointing to or placing a marker on the container without the sticker. Across ages, children performed less well when the clue was the point than when it was the marker. They were able to use the misleading marker cue, learning to look under the unmarked container. However, they could not do this for the misleading point. These results concur with those from studies of point production (Carlson, Moses & Hix, 1998) in indicating that deceptive pointing may be a misleading measure of children’ s abilities. At a very early age children learn the communicative value of the point gesture. This knowledge may become so entrenched that children have dife culty interpreting points in a novel manner. A challenge facing developmental psychologists is e nding behaviours to index children’ s underlying knowledge. This issue has come to the foreground in research on children’ s theories of mind. Finding problems with the classic ‘ Maxi’ task (Wimmer & Perner, 1983), several researchers have argued that children’ s ability to deceive another person may be a more sensitive indicator of whether children understand false beliefs (e.g.

Action Experience, More than Observation, Influences Mu Rhythm Desynchronization

Since the discovery of mirror neurons in premotor and parietal areas of the macaque monkey, the idea that action and perception may share the same neural code has been of central interest in social, developmental, and cognitive neurosciences. A fundamental question concerns how a putative human mirror neuron system may be tuned to the motor experiences of the individual. The current study tested the hypothesis that prior motor experience modulated the sensorimotor mu and beta rhythms. Specifically, we hypothesized that these sensorimotor rhythms would be more desynchronized after active motor experience compared to passive observation experience. To test our hypothesis, we collected EEG from adult participants during the observation of a relatively novel action: an experimenter used a claw-like tool to pick up a toy. Prior to EEG collection, we trained one group of adults to perform this action with the tool (performers). A second group comprised trained video coders, who only had experience observing the action (observers). Both the performers and the observers had no prior motor and visual experience with the action. A third group of novices was also tested. Performers exhibited the greatest mu rhythm desynchronization in the 8–13 Hz band, particularly in the right hemisphere compared to observers and novices. This study is the first to contrast active tool-use experience and observation experience in the mu rhythm and to show modulation with relatively shorter amounts of experience than prior mirror neuron expertise studies. These findings are discussed with respect to its broader implication as a neural signature for a mechanism of early social learning.

The mutual exclusivity bias in children's word learning: By W. E. Merriman and L. L. Bowman. In Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 54, Serial No. 220, 1989☆

Abstract Merriman and Bowman (1989) explore one proposed constraint on word learning, mutual exclusivity, the assumption that each object has only one label. Chief among their contributions is treatment of mutual exclusivity as a default assumption—a probabilistic bias which can be overridden. We elaborate this view to address misconceptions of the notions of biological constraints that pervade recent discussions of constraints on word learning. Misconstruing constraints as rigid, absolute responses instead of probabilistic biases has led researchers to interpret any violation as invalidating a given constraint. More confusion surrounds questions about the origins of the constraints. We dispute the idea that the age of appearance of lexical constraints reveals whether the constraints are innate, and argue that current discussions of the innateness of constraints are over-simplified. In this case, we also question the appropriateness of Merriman and Bowmans methodology for use with 2-year-olds and challenge their conclusion that mutual exclusivity is absent in children under 2 1 2 . Merriman and Bowmans thoughtful conceptual analysis establishes several distinct ways in which mutual exclusivity can be manifested. Thus, putative counterexamples occur when an investigator tests for only one consequence of mutual exclusivity and ignores its other possible implications. Merriman and Bowmans studies with children from 2 1 2 on document that each of these alternative ways of preserving mutual exclusivity guides word learning.