Twelve months old infants' evaluation of observed comforting behavior using a choice paradigm: The role of animacy cues and self-distress.

Comforting is a prosocial behavior that children start to engage in around their second year of life. There is much less known about their ability to evaluate comforting behavior of others. The current study examined whether 12 months old infants, after having watched animated abstract characters comfort or ignore a third party in distress, would show a preference for the comforting character. Using a manual choice paradigm, we found that infants were more likely to choose the comforting character than the ignoring character (Experiment 1). When the characters however lacked human surface features (eyes) infants did not show a preference (Experiment 2). Furthermore, infants self-distress during the watching of the animations did not prevent infants to evaluate the behavior of the observed characters. These findings support the idea of an early presence of "moral sense" in infancy.

Individuation of agents based on psychological properties in 10 month-old infants.

What makes agents fundamentally different from each other from the viewpoint of a 10-month-old infant? While infants at this age can already individuate human-like objects from non-humanlike ones and self-propelled agents from inert objects, little is known of when and how they start individuating within the domain of agents. What is clear from previous studies is that differences in surface and dynamic features are not sufficient. We hypothesized that mental properties-in this case the agents' preferences-can serve as an individuating property. In our study, we familiarized infants with two animated agents who had different preferences. The agents sequentially and repeatedly emerged from behind an occluder, and then each agent approached one of two target objects before returning behind the occluder. After familiarization, the occluder was lifted, revealing either one agent or two agents. While infants successfully individuated the agents in the preference-demonstration condition, they failed to do so in the exposure-only condition in which perceptually similar surface and dynamic features of the agents were presented but without indicating preferences. Our study thus provides evidence that mental properties can help individuate agents, grounding the claim that infants understand agents as mental entities at their core.

Frontal EEG asymmetry in infants observing separation and comforting events: The role of infants' attachment relationship.

The development of social-cognitive abilities in infancy is subject to an intricate interaction between maturation of neural systems and environmental input. We investigated the role of infants' attachment relationship quality in shaping infants' neural responses to observed social interactions. One-hundred thirty 10-month-old infants participated in an EEG session while they watched animations involving a distressing separation event that ended with either comforting or ignoring behavior. Frontal asymmetry (FA) in the alpha range - which is indicative of approach-withdrawal tendencies - was measured with EEG. Attachment quality was assessed using the Strange Situation procedure at 12 months. Overall, infants with disorganized attachment showed a lack of right-sided - withdrawal related - FA compared to secure and insecure infants. Furthermore, only avoidant infants exhibited reduced right-sided FA responses following the separation. Contrary to our expectations, the type of response (comforting vs. ignoring) did not elicit differences in FA patterns, and attachment quality did not moderate the effects of the type of response on frontal asymmetry. Implications for research on attachment-related biases in social information processing and on the neural underpinnings of prosocial behaviors are discussed.

Negative affect is related to reduced differential neural responses to social and non-social stimuli in 5-to-8-month-old infants: A functional near-infrared spectroscopy-study.

Both social perception and temperament in young infants have been related to social functioning later in life. Previous functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) data (Lloyd-Fox et al., 2009) showed larger blood-oxygenation changes for social compared to non-social stimuli in the posterior temporal cortex of five-month-old infants. We sought to replicate and extend these findings by using fNIRS to study the neural basis of social perception in relation to infant temperament (Negative Affect) in 37 five-to-eight-month-old infants. Infants watched short videos displaying either hand and facial movements of female actors (social dynamic condition) or moving toys and machinery (non-social dynamic condition), while fNIRS data were collected over temporal brain regions. Negative Affect was measured using the Infant Behavior Questionnaire. Results showed significantly larger blood-oxygenation changes in the right posterior-temporal region in the social compared to the non-social condition. Furthermore, this differential activation was smaller in infants showing higher Negative Affect. Our results replicate those of Lloyd-Fox et al. and confirmed that five-to-eight-month-old infants show cortical specialization for social perception. Furthermore, the decreased cortical sensitivity to social stimuli in infants showing high Negative Affect may be an early biomarker for later difficulties in social interaction.

Attachment quality is related to the synchrony of mother and infant monitoring patterns.

We investigated whether attachment quality is related to infant-mother dyadic patterns in monitoring animated social situations. Sixty 12-month-old infants and their mothers participated in an eye-tracking study in which they watched abstractly depicted distress interactions involving the separation of a "baby" and a "parent" character followed by reunion or further separation of the two characters. We measured infants' and their mothers' relative fixation duration to the two characters in the animations. We found that infant attachment disorganization moderated the correspondence between the monitoring patterns of infant-mother dyads during the final part of the animations resulting in reunion or separation. Organized infants and their mothers showed complementary monitoring patterns: the more the mothers focused their attention on the "baby" character, the more the infants focused their attention on the "parent" character, and vice versa. Disorganized infant-mother dyads showed the opposite pattern although the correlation was nonsignificant: mothers and their infants focused on the same character. The attachment-related differences in the nature of the synchrony in the attentional processes of infants and their mothers suggest that by 12 months the dyads' representations of social situations reflect their shared social-emotional experiences.

Attachment and maternal sensitivity are related to infants' monitoring of animated social interactions.

BACKGROUND: Infants have been shown to possess remarkable competencies in social understanding. Little is known, however, about the interplay between the quality of infants' social-emotional experiences with their caregivers and social-cognitive processes in infancy. METHOD: Using eye-tracking we investigated the relation of infant attachment quality and maternal sensitivity with 12-month-old infants' monitoring patterns during the observation of abstractly depicted interactions of a "parent" and a "baby" figure. RESULTS: We found that secure infants focused their attention on the "parent" figure relative to the "baby" figure more than insecure infants when the two figures got separated. Infants with more sensitive mothers focused their attention more on the ongoing behavior of the "parent" figure after the separation than infants with less sensitive mothers when distress of the "baby" figure was implied by accompanying baby crying sounds. CONCLUSION: Our findings support the notion that early social-emotional experiences with the caregiver are related to social information processing and that these social information processing patterns might be markers of infants' developing internal working models of attachment.

Outcome producing potential influences twelve-month-olds' interpretation of a novel action as goal-directed.

Learning about a novel, goal-directed action is a complex process. It requires identifying the outcome of the action and linking the action to its outcome for later use in new situations to predict the action or to anticipate its outcome. We investigated the hypothesis that linking a novel action to a salient change in the environment is critical for infants to assign a goal to the novel action. We report a study in which we show that 12-month-old infants, who were provided with prior experience with a novel action accompanied with a salient visible outcome in one context, can interpret the same action as goal-directed even in the absence of the outcome in another context. Our control condition shows that prior experience with the action, but without the salient effect, does not lead to goal-directed interpretation of the novel action. We also found that, for the case of 9-month-olds infants, prior experience with the outcome producing potential of the novel action does not facilitate a goal-directed interpretation of the action. However, this failure was possibly due to difficulties with generalizing the learnt association to another context rather than with linking the action to its outcome.

Resting frontal EEG asymmetry in children: meta-analyses of the effects of psychosocial risk factors and associations with internalizing and externalizing behavior.

Asymmetry of frontal cortical electroencephalogram (EEG) activity in children is influenced by the social environment and considered a marker of vulnerability to emotional and behavioral problems. To determine the reliability of these associations, we used meta-analysis to test whether variation in resting frontal EEG asymmetry is consistently associated with (a) having experienced psychosocial risk (e.g., parental depression or maltreatment) and (b) internalizing and externalizing behavior outcomes in children ranging from newborns to adolescents. Three meta-analyses including 38 studies (N = 2,523) and 50 pertinent effect sizes were carried out. The studies included in the analyses reported associations between frontal EEG asymmetry and psychosocial risk (k = 20; predominantly studies with maternal depression as the risk factor) as well as internalizing (k = 20) and externalizing (k = 10) behavior outcomes. Psychosocial risk was significantly associated with greater relative right frontal asymmetry, with an effect size of d = .36 (p < .01), the effects being stronger in girls. A non-significant relation was observed between right frontal asymmetry and internalizing symptoms (d = .19, p = .08), whereas no association between left frontal asymmetry and externalizing symptoms was observed (d = .04, p = .79). Greater relative right frontal asymmetry appears to be a fairly consistent marker of the presence of familial stressors in children but the power of frontal asymmetry to directly predict emotional and behavioral problems is modest.

Infants' monitoring of social interactions: the effect of emotional cues.

Relying on information about the emotional state of others is vital for a proper monitoring and representation of social interactions. We tested the impact of vocal emotional cues on 12-month-old infants' monitoring of animated movies that involved the separation of a smaller and a larger oval shape. The separation was accompanied by the sound of either a crying or a laughing baby and was followed either by the return of the larger figure to, or its further separation from, the smaller figure. Eye tracking showed that infants' monitoring pattern was influenced by the type of emotional signal during both the separation phase and the response phase of the animations: During the separation phase infants fixated longer at the larger figure if the separation was accompanied by a crying sound than if laughter could be heard. In the response phase, the influence of the emotional signal depended on the type of response. Infants overall looked more often at the animations during the crying than the laughter sound but only when the larger figure did not return to the smaller figure. These results suggest that infants are able to integrate vocal emotional cues in their representation of observed interactions. Our findings are also discussed in relation to the source of negativity bias in infants' information processing.

From outcome prediction to action selection: developmental change in the role of action-effect bindings.

Ideomotor theory considers bidirectional action-effect associations to be the fundamental building blocks for intentional action. The present study employed a novel pupillometric and oculomotor paradigm to study developmental changes in the role of action-effects in the acquisition of voluntary action. Our findings suggest that both 7- and 12-month-olds (and adults) can use acquired action-effect bindings to predict action outcomes but only 12-month-olds (and adults) showed evidence for employing action-effects to select actions. This dissociation supports the idea that infants acquire action-effect knowledge before they have developed the cognitive machinery necessary to make use of that knowledge to perform intentional actions.

The role of the efficiency of novel actions in infants' goal anticipation.

In two experiments, we recorded infants' eye movements to test whether the efficiency of the action influences infants' ability to anticipate the outcome of an ongoing action performed by abstract figures. In Experiment 1, we found that predictive eye movements were elicited by both nonefficient and efficient actions, but anticipation of the outcome occurred much earlier in the efficient action condition. Experiment 2 was designed to test the effect of saliency of the goal and the possibility that automatic extrapolation of the movement was partly responsible for the predictive gaze shifts in Experiment 1. We found that when automatic extrapolation was prevented and the goal was not salient, infants showed predictive gaze shifts only in the efficient action condition. Taken together, our findings support the importance of teleological inferences in anticipating the goals of ongoing actions.

Primacy of information about means selection over outcome selection in goal attribution by infants.

It has been shown that, when observing an action, infants can rely on either outcome selection information (i.e., actions that express a choice between potential outcomes) or means selection information (i.e., actions that are causally efficient toward the outcome) in their goal attribution. However, no research has investigated the relationship between these two types of information when they are present simultaneously. In an experiment that addressed this question directly, we found that when outcome selection information could disambiguate the goal of the action (e.g., the action is directed toward one of two potential targets), but means selection information could not (i.e., the action is not efficiently adjusted to the situational constraints), 7- and 9-month-old infants did not attribute a goal to an observed action. This finding suggests that means selection information takes primacy over outcome selection information. The early presence of this bias sheds light on the nature of the notion of goal in action understanding.

Evidence for a unitary goal concept in 12-month-old infants.

We investigated whether infants can transfer their goal attribution between situations that contain different types of information about the goal. We found that 12-month-olds who had attributed a goal based on the causal efficacy of a means-end action generated expectations about the actor's action in another scenario in which the actor could choose between alternative outcomes. This finding suggests that, by 12 months, infants possess a unitary concept of goal.

Explicit learning of arbitrary and non-arbitrary action-effect relations in adults and 4-year-olds.

Ideomotor theories claim that carrying out a movement that produces a perceivable effect creates a bidirectional association between the two, which can then be used by action control processes to retrieve the associated action by anticipating its outcome. Previous implicit-learning studies have shown that practice renders novel but action-contingent stimuli effective retrieval cues of the action they used to follow, suggesting that experiencing sequences of actions and effects creates bidirectional action-effect associations. We investigated whether action-effect associations are also acquired under explicit learning conditions and whether familiar action-effect relations (such as between a trumpet and a trumpet sound) are learned the same way as novel, arbitrary relations are. We also investigated whether these factors affect adults and 4-year-old children equally. Findings suggest that explicit learning produces the same bidirectional action-effect associations as implicit-learning does, that non-arbitrary relations improve performance without affecting learning per se, and that adults and young children show equivalent performance - apart from the common observation that children have greater difficulty to withstand stimulus-induced action tendencies.

Where do action goals come from? Evidence for spontaneous action-effect binding in infants.

One of the great questions in psychology concerns how we develop to become intentional agents. Ideomotor theory suggests that intentional actions depend on, and emerge from the automatic acquisition of bidirectional action-effect associations: perceiving an action-effect sequence creates an integrated representation that can be employed for action control in the opposite order, selecting an action by anticipating its effect. We provide first evidence for the spontaneous acquisition of bidirectional action-effect associations in 9- 12-, and 18-month-olds, suggesting that the mechanism underlying action-effect integration is in place at the latest around 9 months of age.

The role of behavioral cues in understanding goal-directed actions in infancy.

Infants show very early sensitivity to a variety of behavioral cues (such as self-propulsion, equifinal movement, free variability, and situational adjustment of behavior) that can be exploited when identifying, predicting, and interpreting goal-directed actions of intentional agents. We compare and contrast recent alternative models concerning the role that different types of behavioral cues play in human infants' early understanding of animacy, agency, and intentional action. We present new experimental evidence from violation of expectation studies to evaluate these alternative models on the nature of early development of understanding goal-directedness by human infants. Our results support the view that, while infants initially do not restrict goal attribution to behaviors of agents exhibiting self-propelled motion, they quickly develop such expectations.

Infants' perception of goal-directed actions: development through cue-based bootstrapping.

It is now widely accepted that sensitivity to goal-directed actions emerges during the first year of life. However, controversy still surrounds the question of how this sensitivity emerges and develops. One set of views emphasizes the role of observing behavioral cues, while another emphasizes the role of experience with producing own action. In a series of four experiments we contrast these two views. In Experiment 1, it was shown that infants as young as 6 months old can interpret an unfamiliar human action as goal-directed when the action involves equifinal variations. Experiments 2 and 3 demonstrated that 12- and 9-month-olds are also able to attribute goals to an inanimate action if it displays behavioral cues such as self-propelledness and an action-effect. In Experiment 4, we found that even 6-months-olds can encode the goal object of an inanimate action if all three cues, equifinality, self-propelledness and an action-effect, were present. These findings suggest that the ability to ascribe goal-directedness does not necessarily emerge from hands-on experience with particular actions and that it is independent from the specific appearance of the actor as long as sufficient behavioral cues are available. We propose a cue-based bootstrapping model in which an initial sensitivity to behavioral cues leads to learning about further cues. The further cues in turn inform about different kinds of goal-directed agents and about different types of actions. By uniting an innate base with a learning process, cue-based bootstrapping can help reconcile divergent views on the emergence of infants' ability to understand actions as goal-directed.