Communicating Shared Knowledge in Infancy

Abstract

Object-directed emotion expressions provide two types of information: They can convey the expressers' person-specific subjective disposition toward objects, or they can be used communicatively as referential symbolic devices to convey culturally shared valence-related knowledge about referents that can be generalized to other individuals. By presenting object-directed emotion expressions in communicative versus noncommunicative contexts, we demonstrated that 18-month-olds can flexibly assign either a person-centered interpretation or an object-centered interpretation to referential emotion displays. When addressed by ostensive signals of communication, infants generalized their object-centered interpretation of the emotion display to other individuals as well, whereas in the noncommunicative emotion-expression context, they attributed to the emoting agent a person-specific subjective dispositional attitude without generalizing this attribution as relevant to other individuals. The findings indicate that, as proposed by natural pedagogy theory, infants are prepared to learn shared cultural knowledge from nonverbal communicative demonstrations addressed to them at a remarkably early age.

Reasoning about Instrumental and Communicative Agency in Human Infancy

“…However, in apparent contrast to this assumption, a recent study by Egyed, Kir aly, and Gergely (2012) demonstrates the special power of ostensive signals to induce a nonepisodic interpretation of a communicative agent's object-directed emotion gestures as conveying relevant information about motivational dispositional properties such as preferences that are socially shared and, as such, can be generalized and attributed to other agents who are not part of the shared episodic context. 18-month olds saw an adult agent display a positive and a negative object-directed facial-vocal emotional expression (liking vs. disgust), one directed toward a novel object on her left, the other toward another unfamiliar object on her right.…”

“…This many (holding the jar), and I got six of this one (holding the display container)" (p. 405). Furthermore, given the fact that the statistical evidence presented by the preferential sampling demonstrations in the study by Ma and Xu (2011) were preceded by strong ostensive-communicative cues directed to the toddlers, it seems entirely possible that what their results demonstrate is not merely that toddlers learnt to ascribe to others preferences different from their own on the basis of one individual's strong sampling behavior but that they would even be willing to generalize the other's preference to different agents as well (as is the case in study by Egyed et al, 2012).…”

“…The study by Egyed et al (2012) on preference attribution discussed at the end of Section 3.1 above provided a first example of this phenomenon (cf. Gergely et al, 2007).…”

Psychological Reasoning in Infancy

“…One type is emotional information: if an agent emotes positively toward one toy but negatively toward another toy, infants attribute to the agent a preference for the first toy (e.g., Barna & Legerstee 2005;Egyed et al 2013). Another type is statistical information: if an agent chooses only toy ducks from a box that contains mostly toy frogs, infants infer that the agent prefers the ducks (e.g., Gweon et al 2010;Kushnir et al 2010).…”

A Természetes pedagógiáról dióhéjban: A kulturális tudás hálójában

“…Továbbá a tizennyolc hónapos babák csak abban az esetben vontak le másokra, más helyzetekre is általánosítható tudást egy tárgyról, ha arról kommunikatív kontextusban fejezte ki érzéseit a modell (Egyed, Király, Gergely, 2013). A kísérlet egyik feltételében a babák azt látták, amint egy modell, miután felvette a babával a szemkontaktust és köszöntötte őt, az asztalon lévő két tárgy közül az egyikre pozitív érzelmekkel, örömmel, érdeklődve nézett, míg a másikra undorral.…”