Infants use attention but not emotions to predict others’ actions

Nature, 2007

Neuroreport, 2008

This study investigates infants' processing of emotional expressions in combination with referential eye gaze cues. In experiment 1, 7-month-old infants' neural responses to fearful and neutral faces, which were looking at a novel object, were assessed. Infants' attention, as indexed by the negative central component of the event-related potential, was enhanced when the adult gazed at the object with a fearful expression compared with a neutral expression. In experiment 2, no e¡ect of emotion on amplitude of the negative central was found when the face directed eye gaze at the infant and away from the object. We conclude that by 7 months, infants use emotional expressions in triadic personobject-person contexts to detect threat in the environment.

Pediatrics, 1998

Infants generally begin to recognize emotional expressions after 6 months of age; some reports have even observed recognition in neonates. Emotional recognition is important for social referencing, in which infants "read" their parents' expressions to understand events. Three methods for studying how infants come to recognize emotion are described in this article: peek-a-boo, matching faces and voices, and multimodal presentation.

Child Development, 1996

L. ; FEHNALD, ANNE; and HERRERA, CARLA. Infants' Responses to Facial and Vocal Emotional Signals in a Social Referencing Paradigm. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1996, 67, 3219-3237. The independent effects of facial and vocal emotional signals and of positive and negative signals on infant behavior were investigated in a novel toy social referencing paradigm. 90 12-month-old infants and their mothers were assigned to an expression condition (neutral, happy, or fear) nested within a modality condition (face-only or voice-only). Each infant participated in 3 trials: a baseline trial, an expression trial, and a final positive trial. We found that fearful vocal emotional signals, when presented without facial signals, were sufficient to elicit appropriate behavior regulation. Infants in the fear-voice condition looked at their mothers longer, showed less toy proximity, and tended to show more negative affect than infants in the neutral-voice condition. Happy vocal signals did not elicit differential responding. The infants' sex was a factor in the few effects that were found for infants' responses to facial emotional signals.

Infancy, 2017

This study investigated infants' sensitivity to others' congruent and incongruent emotional reactions to positive and negative events. Thirty-six 12-month-old infants viewed three distinct interpersonal events (give a toy, break a toy, fight over a toy) followed by an emotional expression (happiness, sadness, anger) that was either congruent or incongruent with the preceding event outcome. The duration of infants' looking toward each emotional reaction was examined. Infants demonstrated sensitivity to incongruent emotional reactions for the give and fight events, representing the earliest evidence to date of emotional sensitivity to negative events. Understanding others' emotions is essential for social competency and involves anticipating, appreciating, and responding appropriately to others' affective communication (Saarni, 1999). A substantial body of research exists examining infants' discrimination of affect (see Walker-Andrews, 1997), social referencing (see Walle, Reschke, & Knothe, 2017), and responding to others' emotions (see Walle & Campos, 2012). However, research examining infants' sensitivity to others' emotional reactions to specific events remains limited and was the focus of the present investigation. Infants' sensitivity to the congruency of emotions and event outcomes develops between 8 and 18 months of age. Previous research found that 10-month-olds, but not 8-month-olds, looked longer at an agent's sad expression than a happy expression following a positive event outcome (e.g., arriving at a desired location), but both age groups looked equally at these expressions following a negative outcome (Skerry & Spelke, 2014). Other work using pupil dilation to index sympathetic arousal found that 10-and 14-month-olds detected incongruent emotions when observing an angry actor perform a positive action (i.e., patting a toy tiger while scowling), but only

Intention reading and action understanding have been reported in ever-younger infants. However, the notions of intention attribution and action understanding, as well as their relation to each other, are surrounded by much confusion, making it difficult to assess the meaning and value of such findings. In this paper we set out to clarify the notions of ‘action understanding’ and ‘intention attribution’, and discuss their relation. We will show that what is commonly referred to as ‘action understanding’ in fact encompasses various heterogeneous association and prediction mechanisms. In general, these forms of action understanding do not result in the attribution of an intention to an observed actor. By disentangling intention attribution from action understanding, and by exposing the latter as an umbrella notion, we provide a framework that allows for better comparison of findings from different experimental paradigms, and a much more fruitful approach to comparative questions.

Predicting others' affiliative relationships is critical to social cognition, but there is little evidence of how this ability develops. We examined 9-month-old infants' inferences about 3rd-party affiliation based on shared and opposing evaluations. Infants expected 2 people who expressed shared evaluations to interact positively, whereas they expected 2 people who expressed opposing evaluations to interact negatively. A control condition revealed that infants' expectations could not be due to mere perceptual repetition. Thus, an abstract understanding that 3rd-party affiliation can be based on shared intentions has roots in the 1st year of life. These findings have implications for understanding humans' earliest representations of the social world.

British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 2011

Infancy, 2018

Research examining infants' discrimination of affect often uses unfamiliar faces and voices of adults. Recently, research has examined infant discrimination of affect in familiar faces and voices. In much of this research, infants were habituated to the affective expressions using a "standard" 50% habituation criterion. We extend this line of research by examining infants' discrimination of unfamiliar peers', that is, 4-month-olds, dynamic, facial, and vocal affective expressions and assessing how discrimination is affected by changing the habituation criterion. In two experiments, using an infant-controlled habituation design, we explored 3-and 5-month-olds' discrimination of their peers' dynamic audiovisual displays of positive and negative expressions of affect. Results of Experiment 1, using a 50% habituation criterion, revealed that 5-month-olds, but not 3-month-olds discriminated the affective expressions of their peers. In Experiment 2, we examined whether 3-month-olds' lack of discrimination in Experiment 1 was a result of insufficient habituation (i.e., familiarization). Specifically, 3-month-olds were habituated using a 70% habituation criterion, providing them with longer familiarization time. Results revealed that using the more stringent habituation criterion, 3-month-olds showed longer habituation times, that is increased familiarization, and discriminated their peers' affective expressions. Results are discussed in terms of infants' discrimination of affect, the role of familiarization time, and limitations of the 50% habituation criterion.

2010

Previous research has shown that 6-month-olds evaluate others on the basis of their social behaviors – they are attracted to prosocial individuals, and avoid antisocial individuals (Hamlin, Wynn & Bloom, 2007). The current studies investigate these capacities prior to 6 months of age. Results from two experiments indicate that even 3-month-old infants evaluate others based on their social behavior towards third parties, and that negative social information is developmentally privileged.