Triadic interactions support infants’ emerging understanding of intentional actions

Abstract

Infants’ understanding of the intentional nature of human action develops gradually across the first year of life. A key question is what mechanisms drive changes in this foundational social‐cognitive ability. The current studies explored the hypothesis that triadic interactions in which infants coordinate attention between a social partner and an object of mutual interest promote infants’ developing understanding of others as intentional agents. Infants’ spontaneous tendency to participate in triadic engagement was assessed in a semi‐structured play session with a researcher. Intentional action understanding was assessed by evaluating infants’ ability to visually predict the goal of an intentional reaching action. Study 1 (N = 88) revealed that 8‐ to 9‐month‐olds who displayed more bouts of triadic engagement showed better concurrent reasoning about the goal of an intentional reaching action. Study 2 (N = 114) confirmed these findings using a longitudinal design and demonstrated that infants who displayed more bouts of triadic engagement at 6–7 months were better at prospectively reasoning about the goal of an intentional reaching action 3 months later. Cross‐lagged path analyses revealed that intentional action understanding at 6–7 months did not predict later triadic engagement, suggesting that early triadic engagement supports later intentional action processing and not the other way around. Finally, evidence from both studies revealed the unique contribution of triadic over dyadic forms of engagement. These results highlight the importance of social interaction as a developmental mechanism and suggest that infants enrich their understanding of intentionality through triadic interactions with social partners.

The Origins of Social Knowledge in Altricial Species

“…Infants may not have learned the actor's goal, but instead may have learned the association between the actor's hand and an object. Similar explanations can be applied to more recent research involving anticipatory looking to failed reaches, often taken as an indication of early understanding of intentionality (e.g., Brandone et al 2020). However, as in Baldwin et al's (2001) study, infants look longer at interrupted motions, which may be interpreted either as infants observing that the adult did not complete their goal or as infants demonstrating sensitivity to irregularities in otherwise predictable motions.…”

The Bidirectional Social-Cognitive Mechanisms of the Social-Attention Symptoms of Autism

“…Initiating joint attention behaviors, such as alternating gaze (see Figure 2 ), may be more specific to human development ( 95 ) and can be reliably measured by 6- and 10-months of age ( 21 , 23 , 25 , 107 ). Moreover, atypical IJA becomes measurable in infant siblings between 6- and 12-months of age ( 23 ) in the same timeframe that social orienting problems in ASD were most clearly observed by Jones and Klin [( 34 ), see Figure 3 ].…”

“…Hypothetically, mentalizing begins with social information processing associated with social orienting and the bi-directional practice of processing one's own attention and another person's attention in triadic “self-other-object” joint attention contexts in infancy ( 20 , 95 , 197 , 212 , 213 ). Repeated experience with sharing visual perspectives to objects or events during joint attention with social partners hypothetically allows infants to construct the internal mental representations and executive processes required for social cognitive mentalizing ( 41 , 107 ). Accordingly, differences in social attention and social cognition may be thought to form a continuous developmental axis of the social symptoms of ASD from infancy through adulthood ( 201 , 214 , 215 ).…”

The road to conventional tool use: Developmental changes in children's material engagement with artifacts in nursery school

“…Meanwhile, Nonaka and Goldfield (2018) and Nonaka and Stoffregen (2020) examined how caregiver-toddler interactions enable the development of the utensil-using skill -both at the home and the nursery school -and Alessandroni (2021) analyzed changes in how children from 5 to 17 months interact in the nursery school, focusing on the development of conventional object use. These and other studies addressing the close intertwinement between materiality and cognitive development (e.g., Alessandroni et al, 2020;Brandone et al, 2020;Cavalcante et al, 2018;Dimitrova & Moro, 2013;Hallam et al, 2016) highlight the need for further research about the intersubjective contexts where tool use develops and the processes by which objects become meaningful in and through material engagement.…”