In this section
Infant Social Cognition
Domain Specific Systems of Infant Processing of Emotional Expressions, or, how do 14-month-olds learn about objects and people from others' emotional expressions
This project, funded by a grant from the Economic and Social Research Council, aims to find out if and how infants use the emotional expressions of others that are directed at objects or people to learn about the world around them and, further, to predict how people will later behave given their inferred preferences or attitudes. Questions we aim to answer with this project are: 1) Can infants use emotional expressions to learn about the relationships between people? 2) Do infants apply emotional expressions differently when they are directed towards objects as opposed to people? 3) How quickly do infants learn from emotional expressions? 4) Do infants understand emotional expressions are a source of information about a person's attitude, or do they see them as communicating some quality about the thing they are aimed at (i.e., that it is a good or bad thing)? 5) What role do cues such as eye-contact, motherese, and referential gaze ('Pedagogical cues') play in infant learning?
Parents and infants visit the lab when the infant is 14-months-old and watch a series of video clips whilst their looking-behaviour is video recorded for later analysis.
Lead Researcher: Lara Platten-Brown
Fast-mapping orientation of inanimate goal-directed agents in the first year of life
Adults spontaneously perceive humans, animals and even abstract agents as having axes (i.e. fronts and backs) and they can take into account the agent’s bodily orientation when considering what the agent can perceive and what it can do. This study looks into very early development of these basic and yet surprisingly understudied building blocks of social cognition.
Lead Researcher: Mikolaj Hernik
Sensitivity to motion-cues of intentional agency across ontogeny: a one trial non-verbal test
The aim of this project is to develop a new fast and nonverbal method of assessing spontaneous detection of agency in basic schematic stimuli. All our participants, both adults and 12-months-old infants took part in exactly the same 10 second long experiment. Both groups showed a very similar behavior: even within this limited time-window their attention was already drawn to events which violated attributions of intentional agency. Importantly, in both groups the effect depended strictly on whether the events included motion-cues of intentional agency in the first place. Overall, this is the first study showing directly a developmental continuity in human agency detection and documenting its reliance on abstract cues conveyed by mere motion.
Lead Researcher: Mikolaj Hernik
Infants’ attributions of goals and preferences
In these studies with 6- and 9-months-old infants we look closely at what information infants rely on in order to understand the goal of observed actions, and in order to form expectations about the agent’s future actions. The project is run in collaboration with Victoria Southgate, Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, Birkbeck, University of London.
Lead Researcher: Mikolaj Hernik
What do infants understand about growth?
In this study we compare how infants represent object-transformations which are either internally induced (i.e. growth) or externally imposed. We want to know if children or even infants may be treating objects which are capable of changing by themselves differently. By studying infants’ representations of different causal patterns of transformations we hope to capture the early developmental basis of knowledge about biological kinds. The project is run in cooperation with Maciej Haman, Department of Psychology, University of Warsaw.
Lead Researcher: Mikolaj Hernik
Motion-cues of leadership
We study young preschoolers’ ability to recognize the agents who are the leaders of the group. We are interested in what behaviors and displays do young children rely on when identifying leaders and whether they consider the actual causal influence of the agent on the group’s behavior. The project is run in collaborating with Erno Teglas, Cognitive Development Centre, Central European University.
Lead Researcher: Mikolaj Hernik
