Social interaction targets enhance 13‐month‐old infants' associative learning

Thiele, Maleen; Hepach, Robert; Michel, C.; Gredebäck, Gustaf; Haun, Daniel B. M.

doi:10.1111/infa.12393

Cited by 17 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 50 publications

(68 reference statements)

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“…Infants' looking preference disappears when seeing the same stimuli upside down, indicating that the longer looking times at upright face-to-face scenes do not reflect a response to the low-level perceptual features, but rather a greater interest compared to the "competing" back-to-back scene (Galazka et al, 2014). This interpretation is further supported by a previous study showing that 13-month-old infants organize their attention and associative learning in favor of predicting and actively approaching situations in which they can observe a face-to-face interaction (Thiele, Hepach, Michel, Gredebäck, & Haun, 2021).…”

supporting

confidence: 57%

“…Previous studies have shown that infants find it intrinsically rewarding to engage in social interactions, and that this social motivation increases during the second half of the first year of life (Striano & Bertin, 2005;Venezia, Messinger, Thorp, & Mundy, 2004). Considering the possibility that infants find it also intrinsically valuable to observe others' interactions (e.g., Thiele et al, 2021), it would be possible that social reward-seeking mechanisms underlie the parallel increase in infants' attention to direct interaction partners and others' interactions. Another factor that may influence infants' behavior at the broader level is a more general motivation to establish and foster social bonds with social group members (Over, 2016).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Infants’ Preference for Social Interactions Increases from 7 to 13 Months of Age

et al. 2021

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This study examined 7-to-13.5-month-old middle-class Western infants' visual orienting to third-party interactions in parallel with their social attention behavior during own social interactions (Leipzig, Germany). In Experiment 1, 9.5-to-11-month-olds (n = 20) looked longer than 7-to-8.5-month-olds (n = 20) at videos showing two adults interacting with one another when simultaneously presented with a scene showing two adults acting individually. Moreover, older infants showed higher social engagement (including joint attention) during parent-infant free play. Experiment 2 replicated this age-related increase in both measures and showed that it follows continuous trajectories from 7 to 13.5 months (n = 50). This suggests that infants' attentional orienting to others' interactions coincides with parallel developments in their social attention behavior during own social interactions.

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confidence: 57%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Infants’ Preference for Social Interactions Increases from 7 to 13 Months of Age

et al. 2021

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“…Importantly, infants' attention to social contingency increases with age and becomes dissociated from morphological properties of interlocutors, which may be the reason why we begin to observe its effects on the development of verbal reference by 12-14 months and not earlier. For example (as reviewed in Thiele et al, 2021), at 6 months, infants shift visual attention to a reciprocal social interaction of two people facing each other (Augusti, 2010). By 12 months, infants look longer at socially contingent over nonsocially contingent events (Bakker et al, 2011) and engage in gaze following (or orientation) with entities that act in a socially contingent way, even if they do not have faces (Johnson et al, 1998).…”

Section: Observed Mother-infant Dyads When Infantsmentioning

confidence: 99%

From social contingency to verbal reference: A constructivist hypothesis.

Luchkina¹,

Xu²

2022

Psychological Review

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In the first year of life, infants' word learning is slow, laborious, and requires repeated exposure to word-referent co-occurrences. In contrast, by 14-18 months, infants learn words from just a few labeling events, use joint attention and eye-gaze to decipher word meaning, and begin to use speech to communicate about absent things. We propose that this remarkable advancement in word learning results from attaining a referential understanding of words -that words are linked to mental representations and used intentionally to communicate about realworld entities. We suggest that verbal reference is supported by co-developing conceptual, social, representational, and statistical learning capacities. We also propose that infants' recognition of this tri-directional link between words, referents, and mental representations is enabled by their experience participating in and observing socially contingent interactions.Understanding verbal reference signals a qualitative shift in infants' word learning. This shift enables infants to bootstrap word meanings from syntax and semantics, learn novel words and facts from non-ostensive communication, and make inferences about speakers' epistemic competence based on their language production. In this paper, we review empirical findings across multiple facets of infant cognition and propose a novel developmental theory of verbal reference. Finally, we suggest new directions of empirical research that may provide stronger and more direct evidence for our theory and contribute to our understanding of the development of verbal reference and language-mediated learning in infancy and beyond.

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“…On the other hand, if one patron, standing second in line, observes the patron in front of them order an unusual drink and then decides to order it for the first time themselves, without ever speaking to the other patron, this is better interpreted as the imitator attempting to learn about a new potential reward from the model. Infants are capable of using cues such as proximity, orientation, and contingency to recognize social interaction (Beier & Spelke, 2012;Fawcett & Gredeback, 2013;Powell & Spelke, 2013;Papeo, et al, 2020;Thiele et al, 2021), and it is plausible that these cues impact the inferences and evaluations they make from observations of imitation. The influence of interaction context on social inference may also explain how parallel play functions as an affiliative activity for toddlers (Parten, 1933;Rubin, et al, 1978;Bakeman & Brownlee, 1980): so long as their social cues establish that they are engaged in a joint interaction, children's play need not depend on one another's actions for success in order to encompass a shared goal.…”

Section: Disambiguating Affiliation From Other Motives For Imitationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Adopted utility calculus: Origins of a concept of social affiliation

Lj¹

2021

Preprint

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To successfully navigate their social world, humans need to understand and map enduring relationships between people: we need a concept of social affiliation. Here I propose that our initial concept of social affiliation, available to human infants, is based on the extent to which one individual consistently takes on the goals and needs of another. This proposal grounds affiliation in a commonsense psychology that treats individuals as rational actors, as formalized in the naive utility calculus model. A concept of affiliation based on interpersonal utility adoption can account for findings from studies of infants’ reasoning about imitation and similarity, helpful and fair individuals, “ritual” behaviors, and social groups, without the need for additional innate mechanisms such as a coalitional psychology, moral sense, or general social preference for similar others. This concept of affiliation also offers a new view on the prosocial nature of imitation, placing the value of aligning with someone else’s behavior in the adoption of their goals rather than in mere similarity. I propose further tests of this concept of affiliation, and also discuss how it is likely to be relevant to reasoning and learning about social relationships across the lifespan.

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Social interaction targets enhance 13‐month‐old infants' associative learning

Abstract: This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

Cited by 17 publications

References 50 publications

Infants’ Preference for Social Interactions Increases from 7 to 13 Months of Age

Infants’ Preference for Social Interactions Increases from 7 to 13 Months of Age

From social contingency to verbal reference: A constructivist hypothesis.

Adopted utility calculus: Origins of a concept of social affiliation

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