An intervention facilitated 3-month-old infants' apprehension of objects either prior to (reach first), or after (watch first) viewing another person grasp similar objects in a visual habituation procedure. Action experience facilitated action perception: reach-first infants focused on the relation between the actor and her goal, but watch-first infants did not. Infants' sensitivity to the actor's goal was correlated with their engagement in object-directed contact with the toys. These findings indicate that infants can rapidly form goal-based action representations and suggest a developmental link between infants' goal directed actions and their ability to detect goals in the actions of others.

No abstract

Cooperation and competition are two basic modes of social cognition that necessitate monitoring of both one's own and others' actions, as well as adopting a specific mental set. In this fMRI, study individuals played a specially designed computer game, according to a set of predefined rules, either in cooperation with or in competition against another person. The hemodynamic response during these conditions was contrasted to that of the same subjects playing the game independently. Both cooperation and competition stances resulted in activation of a common frontoparietal network subserving executive functions, as well as the anterior insula, involved in autonomic arousal. Moreover, distinct regions were found to be selectively associated with cooperation and competition, notably the orbitofrontal cortex in the former and the inferior parietal and medial prefrontal cortices in the latter. This pattern reflects the different mental frameworks implicated in being cooperative versus competitive with another person. In accordance with evidence from evolutionary psychology as well as from developmental psychology, we argue that cooperation is a socially rewarding process and is associated with specific left medial orbitofrontal cortex involvement.

Human cooperation is a key driving force behind the evolutionary success of our hominin lineage. At the proximate level, biologists and social scientists have identified other-regarding preferences – such as fairness based on egalitarian motives, and altruism – as likely candidates for fostering large-scale cooperation. A critical question concerns the ontogenetic origins of these constituents of cooperative behavior, as well as whether they emerge independently or in an interrelated fashion. The answer to this question will shed light on the interdisciplinary debate regarding the significance of such preferences for explaining how humans become such cooperative beings. We investigated 15-month-old infants' sensitivity to fairness, and their altruistic behavior, assessed via infants' reactions to a third-party resource distribution task, and via a sharing task. Our results challenge current models of the development of fairness and altruism in two ways. First, in contrast to past work suggesting that fairness and altruism may not emerge until early to mid-childhood, 15-month-old infants are sensitive to fairness and can engage in altruistic sharing. Second, infants' degree of sensitivity to fairness as a third-party observer was related to whether they shared toys altruistically or selfishly, indicating that moral evaluations and prosocial behavior are heavily interconnected from early in development. Our results present the first evidence that the roots of a basic sense of fairness and altruism can be found in infancy, and that these other-regarding preferences develop in a parallel and interwoven fashion. These findings support arguments for an evolutionary basis – most likely in dialectical manner including both biological and cultural mechanisms – of human egalitarianism given the rapidly developing nature of other-regarding preferences and their role in the evolution of human-specific forms of cooperation. Future work of this kind will help determine to what extent uniquely human sociality and morality depend on other-regarding preferences emerging early in life.

Adults and children readily construct action representations organized with respect to an ultimate goal. These representations allow one to predict the consequences of action, interpret and describe actions, and categorize action sequences. In this paper, we explore the ontogeny of hierarchically organized action representations, and its relation to infants' ability to produce similar sequences. To do so, we examine infants' perception and performance of a means-end sequence: pulling a cloth to retrieve a toy. Using a visual habituation paradigm, we demonstrate that 12-month-old infants understand that the initial step of the cloth-pulling sequence is directed toward the ultimate goal of attaining the toy, and use their knowledge of the causal constraints of the sequence to make this goal attribution. Ten-month-olds, however, appear transitional with respect to this understanding: their ability to identify the goal of the cloth-pulling sequence is related to their own ability to planfully solve a similar sequence. These findings are consistent with a burgeoning body of literature suggesting an intimate link between action production and perception, and suggest that this link is in place by at least 10 months of age. q

Prior work suggests that active experience impacts infants' understanding of simple actions. The present studies compared the impact of active and observational experience on infants' ability to identify the goal of a novel tool use event. Infants received active practice and training using a cane to retrieve an out-of-reach toy, or matched observational experience, prior to taking part in a habituation paradigm that assessed infants' ability to identify the goal of another person's tool use acts. Active training alone facilitated 10-month-old infants' ability to identify the goal of the tool use event. Active experience using tools may enable infants to build motor representations of tool use events that subsequently guide action perception and support action understanding.

Recent work provides evidence that expectations regarding a fair (i.e., equal) distribution of goods and resources arise sometime in the second year of life. To investigate the developmental trajectory of fairness expectations, and their potential relation to prosocial behavior, infants participated in a violation‐of‐expectancy (VOE) paradigm designed to assess expectations regarding how resources are typically distributed, and in a sharing task, an informational helping task, and an instrumental helping task. Infants’ expectations regarding resource distribution showed age‐related changes between 12 and 15 months, with only 15‐month‐old infants showing greater attention to unfair (unequal) over fair (equal) outcomes in the VOE. Individual differences in infants’ sensitivity to unfair outcomes were related to infants’ willingness to share a preferred toy. In contrast, helping behavior was unrelated to infants’ sensitivity to unfair outcomes and did not vary according to whether infants shared a preferred or non‐preferred toy during the sharing task. Our findings suggest a developmental transition in expectations regarding how resources are distributed from 12 to 15 months of age, linked to infants’ sharing behavior, suggesting that such expectations are learned through experience. Our results also contribute to the ongoing discussion regarding how best to assess the construct of prosociality in infancy.

Two experiments assessed infants' understanding that actions that occur in sequence may be related to an overarching goal. Experiment 1 tested whether embedding an ambiguous action (touching the lid of a box) in a sequence that culminated with an action infants readily construe as goal-directed (grasping a toy inside the box) would alter infants' construal of the ambiguous action. Having seen the ambiguous action in this context, infants later construed this action in isolation as being directed at the toy within the box. Experiment 2 tested whether infants related the two actions on the basis of the temporal or the causal relation between them. When the causal relation was disrupted but the temporal relation was preserved, infants no longer related the two actions. These findings indicate that 12-month-old infants relate single actions to overarching goals and that they do so by construing goal-directed action in a causal framework.