Dare A. Baldwin

Evidence for ‘motionese’: modifications in mothers’ infant‐directed action

We investigated the possibility that mothers modify their infant-directed actions in ways that might assist infants’ processing of human action. In a between-subjects design, 51 mothers demonstrated the properties of five novel objects either to their infant (age 6‐8 months or 11‐13 months) or to an adult partner. As predicted, demonstrations to infants were higher in interactiveness, enthusiasm, proximity to partner, range of motion, repetitiveness and simplicity, indicating that mothers indeed modify their infant-directed actions in ways that likely maintain infants’ attention and highlight the structure and meaning of action. The findings demonstrate that ‘motherese’ is broader in scope than previously recognized, including modifications to action as well as language. As people pursue their goals and intentions in the world, they produce complex streams of motion involving a diverse array of objects. As observers of such everyday action, simply perceiving and identifying the objects involved is a remarkable accomplishment, as is recognizing motion as resulting from an entity’s movement independent of ourselves (Palmer, 1999). Yet we readily achieve an analysis of others’ actions that goes well beyond such fundamental issues. We detect relevant structure within the flow of motion, note where one action ends and the next begins, and identify the psychological forces motivating the actor’s specific patterns of movement. How we achieve all this remains as yet largely unanswered. Any account ultimately offered for these crucial action analysis skills will need to explain, among other things, how infants and young children acquire these skills. In this article, we consider the possibility that infants receive some assistance from adults as they begin acquiring skills for processing and interpreting complex, everyday action. In particular, we suggest that when interacting with infants, adults modify their movements in ways that simultaneously enhance infants’ attention to action 1 and highlight meaningful units within the flow

What Can the Study of Cognitive Development Reveal About Children's Ability to Appreciate and Cope with Advertising?

The authors assess the study of cognitive development and what it reveals about childrens ability to appreciate and cope with advertising. Whereas prior research on children and advertising has drawn heavily on Piagets developmental theory, the authors argue that more recent approaches that focus on the development of childrens “theories of mind” and “executive functioning” skills may prove more fruitful. The review of research on these topics generates two predictions: First, on the basis of theories-of-mind literature, the authors expect that children have well-formed conceptions of the intentions underlying advertising by seven or eight years of age. Second, on the basis of executive functions literature, the authors expect that children are not able to deploy these concepts effectively in their everyday lives until much later in development.

Links between Social Understanding and Early Word Learning: Challenges to Current Accounts

If young children approached word learning with little social savvy, certain predictable patterns of error would arise in the way they interpret new words. The absence of such errors provides evidence that social understanding informs word learning even in the infancy period. We outline such evidence, and then scrutinize it with respect to four challenges. 1) Is it necessary to invoke genuine social understanding to explain infants’ word-learning successes? 2) Do infants treat social clues as criterial in their interpretation of new words? 3) Individuals suffering clear deficits in social understanding sometimes display apparently intact vocabulary acquisition: Must we then conclude that word learning can proceed without the aid of social understanding? 4) Is processing of social clues too effortful to be generally useful for everyday word learning? The first challenge is answered by the available evidence: Infants indeed capitalize on social understanding to interpret new words. Although the remaining challenges have yet to be resolved, we offer speculations that might profitably guide future investigation.

Segmenting dynamic human action via statistical structure

Human social, cognitive, and linguistic functioning depends on skills for rapidly processing action. Identifying distinct acts within the dynamic motion flow is one basic component of action processing; for example, skill at segmenting action is foundational to action categorization, verb learning, and comprehension of novel action sequences. Yet little is currently known about mechanisms that may subserve action segmentation. The present research documents that adults can register statistical regularities providing clues to action segmentation. This finding provides new evidence that structural knowledge gained by mechanisms such as statistical learning can play a role in action segmentation, and highlights a striking parallel between processing of action and processing in other domains, such as language.

Sources of information for discriminating dynamic human actions

Despite the importance of action identification and discrimination in action perception and social cognition more broadly, little research has investigated how these processes are achieved. To this end, we sought to identify the extent to which adults capitalize on featural versus configural sources of information when discriminating small-scale human actions such as grasp and place. Results across two experiments indicate adults are sensitive to both sources of information in action discrimination, but selectively attend to featural over configural action information. The findings also parallel what is known regarding face processing: processing of configural information is especially disrupted by inversion, whereas processing of featural information is specifically affected by low-pass filtering.

Acoustic Packaging: Maternal Speech and Action Synchrony

The current study addressed the degree to which maternal speech and action are synchronous in interactions with infants. English-speaking mothers demonstrated the function of two toys, stacking rings and nesting cups to younger infants (6-9.5 months) and older infants (9.5-13 months). Action and speech units were identified, and speech units were coded as being ongoing action descriptions or nonaction descriptions (examples of nonaction descriptions include attention-getting utterances such as “Look!” or statements of action completion such as “Yay, we did it!”). Descriptions of ongoing actions were found to be more synchronous with the actions themselves in comparison to other types of utterances, suggesting that: 1) mothers align speech and action to provide synchronous “acoustic packaging” during action demonstrations; and 2) mothers selectively pair utterances directly related to actions with the action units themselves rather than simply aligning speech in general with actions. Our results complement past studies of acoustic packaging in two ways. First, we provide a quantitative temporal measure of the degree to which speech and action onsets and offsets are aligned. Second, we offer a semantically based analysis of the phenomenon, which we argue may be meaningful to infants known to process global semantic messages in infant-directed speech. In support of this possibility, we determined that adults were capable of classifying low-pass filtered action- and nonaction-describing utterances at rates above chance.

2010 Special Issue: Social gating and pedagogy: Mechanisms for learning and implications for robotics

It seems self-evident that human responsiveness to social input enhances learning, yet the details of the social forces at play are only beginning to come into focus. Recent research on language and cognitive development in preschoolers and infants illuminates mechanisms such as social gating and natural pedagogy, and specific ways in which they benefit learning. We review such advances and consider implications of this research for designing robotic systems that can harness the power of social forces for learning.

Statistical learning of action: The role of conditional probability

Identification of distinct units within a continuous flow of human action is fundamental to action processing. Such segmentation may rest in part on statistical learning. In a series of four experiments, we examined what types of statistics people can use to segment a continuous stream involving many brief, goal-directed action elements. The results of Experiment 1 showed no evidence for sensitivity to conditional probability, whereas Experiment 2 displayed learning based on joint probability. In Experiment 3, we demonstrated that additional exposure to the input failed to engender sensitivity to conditional probability. However, the results of Experiment 4 showed that a subset of adults—namely, those more successful at identifying actions that had been seen more frequently than comparison sequences—were also successful at learning conditional-probability statistics. These experiments help to clarify the mechanisms subserving processing of intentional action, and they highlight important differences from, as well as similarities to, prior studies of statistical learning in other domains, including language.

Inferring action structure and causal relationships in continuous sequences of human action.

In the real world, causal variables do not come pre-identified or occur in isolation, but instead are embedded within a continuous temporal stream of events. A challenge faced by both human learners and machine learning algorithms is identifying subsequences that correspond to the appropriate variables for causal inference. A specific instance of this problem is action segmentation: dividing a sequence of observed behavior into meaningful actions, and determining which of those actions lead to effects in the world. Here we present a Bayesian analysis of how statistical and causal cues to segmentation should optimally be combined, as well as four experiments investigating human action segmentation and causal inference. We find that both people and our model are sensitive to statistical regularities and causal structure in continuous action, and are able to combine these sources of information in order to correctly infer both causal relationships and segmentation boundaries.

Pointing As a Socio-Pragmatic Cue to Particular vs. Generic Reference

Generic noun phrases, or generics, refer to abstract kind categories (Dogs bark) rather than particular individuals (Those dogs bark). How do children distinguish these distinct kinds of reference? We examined the role of one socio-pragmatic cue, namely pointing, in producing and comprehending generic versus particular reference. Study 1 demonstrated that parents of preschool-aged children pointed more when referring to particular instances versus generic kinds. Studies 2 and 3 addressed how children interpreted pointing when linguistic cues were ambiguous with respect to the generic versus particular distinction, for example, They are afraid of raccoons said in the presence of several dogs, where they could refer to the generic category (dogs) or a particular set (the/those dogs). Results indicate only a partial socio-pragmatic sensitivity to pointings role in marking particular reference. They additionally speak to issues related to childrens acquisition of generics and their expectations regarding transmission of generic knowledge.