Statistical learning as a basis for social understanding in children

Ruffman, Ted; Taumoepeau, Mele; Perkins, Chris

doi:10.1111/j.2044-835x.2011.02045.x

Cited by 117 publications

(118 citation statements)

References 95 publications

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“…In this context, it has, for example, been argued that infants' imitation of unobserved end states does not necessarily imply that they understood the intentions of the model who tried but failed to perform a certain action. Their imitation performance might simply be the result of them copying the model's trying behaviour, which inevitably led to the 'intended' result [115]. Also the fact that infants respond differentially to an experimenter who is either unwilling to give them a toy or tried but failed to pass it to them does not prove that infants correctly identified these different intentions.…”

Section: From Behaviour Reading To Mind Readingmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…Also the fact that infants respond differentially to an experimenter who is either unwilling to give them a toy or tried but failed to pass it to them does not prove that infants correctly identified these different intentions. However, it might just be a consequence of the fact that the adult's behaviours are indicative of different probabilities of them eventually getting the toy [115]. It thus remains an open question whether infants understand others' intentions from early in life onwards.…”

Section: From Behaviour Reading To Mind Readingmentioning

confidence: 99%

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What are you doing? How active and observational experience shape infants' action understanding

Hunnius

Bekkering

2014

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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From early in life, infants watch other people's actions. How do young infants come to make sense of actions they observe? Here, we review empirical findings on the development of action understanding in infancy. Based on this review, we argue that active action experience is crucial for infants' developing action understanding. When infants execute actions, they form associations between motor acts and the sensory consequences of these acts. When infants subsequently observe these actions in others, they can use their motor system to predict the outcome of the ongoing actions. Also, infants come to an understanding of others' actions through the repeated observation of actions and the effects associated with them. In their daily lives, infants have plenty of opportunities to form associations between observed events and learn about statistical regularities of others' behaviours. We argue that based on these two forms of experience-active action experience and observational experience-infants gradually develop more complex action understanding capabilities.

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Section: From Behaviour Reading To Mind Readingmentioning

confidence: 97%

Section: From Behaviour Reading To Mind Readingmentioning

confidence: 99%

What are you doing? How active and observational experience shape infants' action understanding

Hunnius

Bekkering

2014

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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“…In a recent review, Ruffman, Taumoepeau, and Perkins (2012) discussed the relevance of statistical learning to infants' performance on theory of mind and intention understanding tasks. The authors suggest that statistical learning allows the child to predict actions, which has implications for the IWMs discussed in this review.…”

Section: Statistical Learningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Infant capacities related to building internal working models of attachment figures: A theoretical and empirical review

Sherman

Rice

Cassidy

2015

Developmental Review

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A B S T R A C TAccording to attachment theory (e.g., Bowlby, 1969Bowlby, /1982Bowlby, , 1973Bowlby, , 1980, infants develop cognitive models (termed internal working models, IWMs) of their attachment figures during the first year of life. Bowlby proposed his initial thinking about IWMs as more of an outline than a fully defined concept (Bretherton & Munholland, 2008). As such, considerable subsequent theoretical and empirical works have aimed to increase understanding of how IWMs operate (e.g., Bretherton & Munholland, 2008;Main, Kaplan, & Cassidy, 1985). To date, however, relatively little research has explored infant cognition with respect to the development of the IWM. In this review, we summarize the IWM concept as it applies to caregiver-specific attachment representations in infancy, review research examining cognitive capacities relevant to building these caregiver-specific representations, and provide directions for future research. We bridge social and cognitive developmental literatures and suggest ways in which researchers can continue to examine these representations. Both attachment researchers and social cognitive researchers can learn from each others' theoretical models and methodologies to understand development at the intersection of social, emotional, and cognitive development in infancy.

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“…One such interpretation stems from recent proposals that early expectations about agents' actions are primarily statistical in nature (e.g., Paulus et al, 2011c;Perner, 2010;Ruffman, Taumoepeau, & Perkins, 2012). In this view, infants gather a wealth of statistical information about the actions agents produce in daily life.…”

Section: A New Test Of the Efficiency Principlementioning

confidence: 99%

“…For example, if an infant who saw three objects being placed in a box represented that "an object and another object and another object" were in the box, we would grant the infant an implicit, but not an explicit, understanding of the concept "three"; this last concept would not figure in any way in her reasoning about the event. Some researchers have recently argued that all of psychological reasoning prior to about age 4-the age at which children begin to succeed at standard elicited-response false-belief tasks-is implicit in this first (sham) sense (e.g., Perner, 2010;Ruffman et al, 2012). In this view, young children are "mindblind" and incapable of attributing any mental states to others; instead, they rely on statistical rules, derived from everyday experience, to predict or respond to others' actions.…”

Section: The Explicit-reasoning Accountmentioning

confidence: 99%

Psychological and sociomoral reasoning in infancy.

Baillargeon¹,

Scott²,

He³

et al. 2015

APA Handbook of Personality and Social Psychology, Volume 1: Attitudes and Social Cognition.

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IntroductionConsider the following scene: A man wearing a backpack is pacing leisurely back and forth in a large airport room. As he strolls, he occasionally crosses his arms, twirls the dangling straps of his backpack, or stuffs his hands in his pant pockets. At one point, he sits down, takes off his backpack, and removes from it a bag filled with assorted gummy bears; as he peers intently inside the bag, he selects and eats, one at a time, five red gummy bears.As adults, we would have no difficulty interpreting the man's actions. We might view his initial actions-pacing, crossing his arms, and so on-as intentional (as opposed to accidental) though not as directed toward any particular goal. In contrast, we might perceive his subsequent actions-removing the bag of gummy bears from his backpack and eating five red ones in succession-as both intentional and goal-directed. In analyzing these actions, we might build an explanation that attributes to the man a causally coherent set of motivational and epistemic mental states: He wants to eat gummy bears, he is particularly fond of red ones, and so when he spies one in the bag, he removes it and eats it.Next, consider a new scene: As the man is happily chewing on red gummy bears, he notices a second man approaching who is carrying two heavy suitcases. At this point, our scene might unfold according to different scenarios. In one, the first man greets the second man, offers to carry one of the suitcases, and holds out his bag of gummy bears. In another scenario, the first man continues to watch the second man but makes no move to approach him. In yet another scenario, the first man sticks out a leg to trip the second man, causing him to fall heavily.As adults, we would interpret and evaluate the first man's actions in the three scenarios very differently. In the first scenario, we might infer that the two men have a social group in common: They might be friends, coworkers, or relatives, for example. In the second scenario, we 3 would conclude that the two men are strangers. In both the first and second scenarios, we would view the first man's behavior as acceptable: Offering help and sharing food are expected prosocial behaviors in interactions with ingroup, but not outgroup, individuals. In contrast, the first man's behavior in the third scenario would seem to us beyond the pale: Unprovoked harmful actions, even against outgroup individuals, are generally viewed as unacceptable. We would categorize the first man as an antisocial lout, and we might file away distinctive characteristics as possible markers of a social group to be avoided in the future.Our discussion of the two scenes above illustrates the rich analyses that adults spontaneously engage in when watching others act. What are the developmental origins of these interpretations? Over the past 25 years, there has been a great deal of research on social cognition in infancy. This research can be roughly organized into two sets of questions that map neatly onto the two scenes above. First, when watching an agen...

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Statistical learning as a basis for social understanding in children

Cited by 117 publications

References 95 publications

What are you doing? How active and observational experience shape infants' action understanding

What are you doing? How active and observational experience shape infants' action understanding

Infant capacities related to building internal working models of attachment figures: A theoretical and empirical review

Psychological and sociomoral reasoning in infancy.

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