From understanding others' needs to prosocial action: Motor and social abilities promote infants' helping

Köster, Moritz; Itakura, Shoji; Omori, Masaki; Kärtner, Joscha

doi:10.1111/desc.12804

Cited by 20 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…This particular longitudinal pathway from intention understanding to instrumental helping was predicted given the close conceptual mapping between understanding a goal‐directed action and intervening to help someone complete a goal‐directed action (Dunfield, 2014). These findings are consistent with recent work by Köster and colleagues (2019), highlighting concurrent links between toddlers’ understanding of unmet instrumental goals and their subsequent helping behavior. Intention understanding—the ability to read past the surface features of actions and make inferences about an actor's goals—has been argued to be a major development milestone that lays the groundwork for later social‐cognitive achievements, including language (Baldwin & Moses, 2001), social learning (Csibra & Gergely, 2007), theory of mind (Wellman et al, 2008), and moral reasoning (Sodian et al, 2016).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 92%

“…Work by Köster and colleagues confirms that by around 9 months of age, infants understand when an agent is in need due to an inability to complete a goal and they expect another individual to provide assistance in this scenario (Köster et al, 2016). At 14 months of age, this understanding is linked to toddlers' own helping behavior—at least for toddlers with sufficient motor and social interaction skills to enact help (Köster et al, 2019). There is also initial evidence of links between intention understanding and later sharing behavior: Paulus et al (2015) found that infants' goal encoding at 7 months of age was positively related to their sharing with an absent disliked (but not a liked) peer at age 5.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A longitudinal study of the differential social‐cognitive foundations of early prosocial behaviors

Stout

Karahuta

Laible

et al. 2020

Infancy

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A growing body of work has documented the emergence of instrumental helping and sharing in the second year of life; however, less is known about mechanisms that underlie development and production of prosocial behavior. The current study took a longitudinal approach to explore whether the origins of prosocial behaviors can be traced back to foundational social‐cognitive capacities emerging in infancy. In a sample of 90 children, longitudinal relations were examined between intention understanding and joint attention measured in infancy (8–12 months) and later instrumental helping and sharing behavior assessed in the toddler years (18–25 months). We expected social‐cognitive capacities supporting infants’ understanding of others to be positively related to their prosocial behaviors as toddlers. Measured variable path analyses revealed two distinct developmental pathways from infant social cognition to later prosocial behavior: 1) Instrumental helping in the toddler years was positively predicted by intention understanding in infancy; 2) sharing in the toddler years was positively predicted by infants’ initiating joint attention. These results lend support to proposals on the multidimensional nature of early prosocial behavior and offer the first longitudinal evidence that the origins of toddlers' prosocial behavior can be traced to social‐cognitive capacities emerging in infancy.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 92%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A longitudinal study of the differential social‐cognitive foundations of early prosocial behaviors

Stout

Karahuta

Laible

et al. 2020

Infancy

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…Predictive models are formed at each level of the hierarchy and in different domains, and the interplay between different levels and domains is not well understood. For example, many physical and social concepts emerge before infants can put them into words (e,g, Bergelson & Swingley, 2012) or action (e.g., Köster, Itakura, Omori, & Kärtner, 2019; see also Köster & Kärtner, 2019), which suggests that these cognitive capacities develop independently from specific motor abilities. For future research, it will be intriguing to understand the development at different levels of the hierarchy and interdependency between different hierarchical levels.…”

Section: Future Perspectivesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Making Sense of the World: Infant Learning From a Predictive Processing Perspective

Köster

Kayhan

Langeloh

et al. 2020

Perspect Psychol Sci

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For human infants, the first years after birth are a period of intense exploration—getting to understand their own competencies in interaction with a complex physical and social environment. In contemporary neuroscience, the predictive-processing framework has been proposed as a general working principle of the human brain, the optimization of predictions about the consequences of one’s own actions, and sensory inputs from the environment. However, the predictive-processing framework has rarely been applied to infancy research. We argue that a predictive-processing framework may provide a unifying perspective on several phenomena of infant development and learning that may seem unrelated at first sight. These phenomena include statistical learning principles, infants’ motor and proprioceptive learning, and infants’ basic understanding of their physical and social environment. We discuss how a predictive-processing perspective can advance the understanding of infants’ early learning processes in theory, research, and application.

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“…According to Köster and colleagues (Köster, Itakura, Omori, & Kärtner, 2019), emergence of instrumental helping during the second year of life becomes possible as the child's fine motor skills and social interactions continue to develop. Indeed, before helping behavior can take place, a child must understand that the other person is in need of help, and the child's motor system should be sufficiently developed to carry out the helping action.…”

Section: Origins Of Prosocial Behavior and Factors Affecting Itmentioning

confidence: 99%

Better Language — Faster Helper: The Relation Between Spontaneous Instrumental Helping Action and Language Ability in Family-Reared and Institutionalized Toddlers

Kochukhova¹,

Dyagileva²,

Михайлова³

et al. 2021

Psych. Rus.

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Background. Prosocial behavior is the key component of social and interpersonal relations. One of the elements of prosociality is helping behavior, which emerges already in early childhood. Researchers have identified several domains of helping behavior: instrumental helping, comforting another person, and sharing resources with others. The development of helping behavior can depend on a number of factors: children’s age, the social situation of development, communication skills, and the ability to understand the feelings and needs of another person. Objective. In Study 1, the main goal was to determine the effects of age and cognitive, language, and motor development on instrumental helping skills in early childhood. The goal of Study 2 was to estimate the effects of rearing in an adverse social environment by comparing the capacity for instrumental helping in family-raised and institutionalized children. Design. The authors examined toddlers’ (N=198) ability to initiate spontaneous helping and the factors that may influence it. Cognitive, language, and fine motor skills were measured by the Bayley Scales of Infant and Child Development, 3rd edition. Children’s instrumental helping behavior was assessed according to the procedure presented by Warneken and Tomasello, with a few modifications. Results. Study 1 demonstrated that children’s ability to initiate helping was dependent on their age: the non-helpers were significantly younger than the helpers. Children’s language skills also played a significant role in their helping behavior. The children with higher language skills helped the adult more often and more quickly. Study 2 demonstrated that institutional placement per se was not related to toddlers’ ability to initiate helping. Language ability was associated with helping behavior both in institution- and family-reared toddlers. Conclusion. Instrumental helping in early childhood is related to children’s age, language skills, and rearing conditions.

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From understanding others' needs to prosocial action: Motor and social abilities promote infants' helping

Cited by 20 publications

References 31 publications

A longitudinal study of the differential social‐cognitive foundations of early prosocial behaviors

A longitudinal study of the differential social‐cognitive foundations of early prosocial behaviors

Making Sense of the World: Infant Learning From a Predictive Processing Perspective

Better Language — Faster Helper: The Relation Between Spontaneous Instrumental Helping Action and Language Ability in Family-Reared and Institutionalized Toddlers

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