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Additive and multiplicative regression models of habituation were compared regarding the fit to looking times from a habituation experiment with infants aged between 3 and 11 months. In contrast to earlier studies, the current study considered multiple probability distributions, namely Weibull, gamma, lognormal and normal distribution. In the habituation experiment the type of contrast between the habituation and the test trial was varied (luminance, color or orientation contrast), crossed with the number of habituation trials (1, 3, 5, or 7 habituation trials) and crossed with three age cohorts (4, 7, 10 months). The initial mean LT to dark stimuli (around 3.7 s) was considerably shorter than the mean LT to green and gray stimuli (around 5 s). Infants showed the strongest dishabituation to changes from dark to bright (luminance contrast) and weak-to-no dishabituation to a 90-degrees rotation of the gray stimuli (orientation contrast). The dishabituation was stronger after five and seven habituation trials, but the result was not statistically robust. The gamma distribution showed the best fit in terms of log-likelihood and mean absolute error and the best predictive performance. Furthermore, the gamma distribution showed small correlations between parameters relative to other models. The normal additive model showed an inferior fit and medium correlations between the parameters. In particular, the positive correlation between the initial looking time (LT) and the habituation rate was likely responsible for a different interpretation relative to the multiplicative models of the main effect of age on the habituation rate. Otherwise, the additive and multiplicative models provided similar statistical conclusions. The performance of the model versions without pooling and with partial pooling across participants (also called random-effects, multi-level or hierarchical models) were compared. The latter type of models showed worse data fit but more precise predictions and reduced correlations between the parameters. The performance of model variants with auto-regressive time structures were explored but showed considerably worse fit. The performance of quadratic models that allowed non-monotonic changes in LTs were investigated as well. However, when fitted with LT data, these models did not produce non-monotonic change in LTs. The study underscores the utility of partial-pooling models in terms of providing more accurate predictions. Further, it agrees with previous research in that a multiplicative LT model is preferable. Nevertheless, the current results suggest that the impact of the choice of an additive model on the statistical inference is less dramatic then previously assumed.

Do toddlers and adults engage in spontaneous Theory of Mind (ToM)? Evidence from anticipatory looking (AL) studies suggests that they do. But a growing body of failed replication studies raised questions about the paradigm’s suitability. In this multi-lab collaboration, we test the robustness of spontaneous ToM measures. We examine whether 18- to 27-month-olds’ and adults’ anticipatory looks distinguish between two basic forms of an agent’s epistemic states: knowledge and ignorance. In toddlers [ANTICIPATED n = 520 50% FEMALE] and adults [ANTICIPATED n = 408, 50% FEMALE] from diverse ethnic backgrounds, we found [SUPPORT/NO SUPPORT] for epistemic state-based action anticipation. Future research can probe whether this conclusion extends to more complex kinds of epistemic states, such as true and false beliefs.

Recent studies suggest that even infants attend to others' beliefs in order to make sense of their behavior. To warrant the assumption of early belief understanding, corresponding competences need to be demonstrated in a variety of different belief-inducing situations. The present study provides corresponding evidence, using a completely nonverbal object-transfer task based on the general violation-of-expectation paradigm. A total of n = 36 infants (15-month-olds) participated in one of three conditions. Infants saw an actor who either observed an object's location change, did not observe it, or performed the location change manually without seeing it (i.e., variations in the actor's information access). Results are in accordance with the assumption that 15-month-old infants master different belief-inducing situations in a highly flexible way, accepting visual as well as manual information access as a proper basis for belief induction.

We investigated whether witnessing social exclusion influenced memory recall in preschool children. A sample of 81 children (Mage = 5 years, 4 months) first watched priming videos either depicting social exclusion or not. Subsequently, they participated in two memory tasks, one testing recall of numbers and the other testing recall of previously heard story events. These consisted of social (e.g., "brother") and nonsocial (e.g., "circus") items. In addition, a language-screening test was conducted to ensure that in both conditions (i.e., social exclusion and control), children's language levels were similar. In both conditions, children scored comparably on number recall and overall recall of story events. However, only children who observed social exclusion remembered more social than nonsocial items. The findings suggest that vicarious social exclusion triggers selective retention of social information in preschool age, in accord with findings of older children and adults who directly experienced social exclusion. Social exclusion affects the need to belong in young children, not only indicated by means of increased attempts to affiliate, but also by an increased memory for social events. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Befunde der neueren Lehrer(innen)forschung verweisen auf die Bedeutung professioneller Lehrer(innen)kompetenz, insbesondere des professionellen Wissens von Lehrkraften, fur die Unterrichtsqualitat und den Erfolg von schulischen Lernprozessen, allerdings bislang primar fur das Fach Mathematik (z.B. Kunter et al. 2011) oder naturwissenschaftliche Facher (z.B. Lange et al. 2015). Fur den Bereich des basalen Lesen- und Schreibenlernens fehlt (bis auf wenige Ausnahmen wie zum Erstlesen z.B. Bratsch-Hines, Vernon-Feagans, Varghese & Garwood 2017; Carlisle, Correnti, Phelps & Zeng 2009; zum Orthografieerwerb z.B. Corvaco del Toro 2013) grundlegende Forschung zur Bedeutung des professionellen Wissens von Lehrkraften fur die Qualitat des schriftsprachlichen Anfangsunterrichts und den Schrifterwerb der Schuler(innen).

Theories suggest that the perception of others’ actions and social cues leads to selective processing of object features. Most recently, natural pedagogy theory postulated that ostensive cues lead to a selective processing of an object’s features at the expense of processing of its location. This study examined this hypothesis in 10-year-old children with and without autism spectrum condition (ASC) to better understand social information processing in ASC and the relevance of observing others in human object processing in general. Participants saw an agent either ostensively pointing to an object or non-ostensively grasping an object. Thereafter, the cued or uncued object changed either its location or identity. We assessed not only behavioral responses, but also participants’ gaze behavior by means of eye tracking. In contrast to natural pedagogy theory, we found that in the non-ostensive grasping context, participants rather noticed an identity change than a location change. Moreover, location changes were more readily identified in the ostensive pointing context. Importantly, there was no difference between children with and without ASC. Our study shows that the perception of ostensively vs. non-ostensively framed actions leads to different processing of object features, indicating a close link between action perception, object processing, and social cues. Moreover, the lacking group difference in our study suggests that these basic perception–action processes are not impaired in autism.

Background/Aims: High maternal emotional availability (EA) positively affects various domains of child development. However, the question of which factors promote or hinder maternal EA has not been investigated systematically. The present study investigated several maternal characteristics, namely maternal psychopathology, maternal attachment style insecurity, and theory of mind (ToM) as possible factors that influence maternal EA. Methods: The sample was comprised of 56 mothers and their preschool-aged children. Half of the mothers were diagnosed with postpartum depression and or anxiety disorders according to DSM-IV, and the other half were healthy controls. Results: The results showed that both low maternal attachment style insecurity and high ToM skills significantly predicted maternal EA sensitivity, independently from maternal postpartum and concurrent psychopathology and education. Moreover, maternal attachment style insecurity fully mediated the link between maternal postpartum psychopathology and sensitivity. Conclusion: The findings suggest that maternal attachment style security can buffer negative effects of maternal psychopathology on maternal sensitivity in the mother-child interaction.

Humans are specifically adapted to knowledge acquisition and transfer by social communication. According to natural pedagogy theory, infants are highly sensitive to signals that indicate a teacher's communicative intention and are biased to interpret communicative contexts as conveying relevant and generalizable knowledge that is also shared by other conspecifics. We investigated whether infants as young as 12 months interpret ostensively communicated object-directed emotion expressions as generalizable and shareable with others. Given that young infants pay particular attention to information about objects' functions, we were interested in whether the shareability assumption also holds for emotional attitudes toward functional features of unfamiliar objects. The results suggest that 12-month-olds (N=80) flexibly interpret another person's emotion displays toward unfamiliar artifacts either as object-centered and generalizable attitudes or as person-centered subjective attitudes, depending on the communicative characteristics of the learning context. Furthermore, the transfer of ostensively communicated information about the artifacts depended on their functional usability, which is consistent with infants' early sensitivity to function information in various areas of cognitive development.

Previous cross-cultural research using false-belief tasks has explored whether children's theory of mind develops synchronously across cultures. Success on false-belief tasks is usually interpreted as an important indicator of children's mental state understanding, but inconsistent findings have led to questions regarding the interpretation of children's success and failure. Based on the assumptions of perceptual access reasoning (Hedger & Fabricius, 2011) and reflecting on inconsistencies in cross-cultural false-belief research, we argue for the advantages of the additional use of true-belief tasks, which can help to differentiate between different levels of children's reasoning. Consequently, a false-belief task and a true-belief task were derived from typical Samoan adult–child interactions. The performance of 40 Samoan children aged 5 to 7 years old was compared to the performance of 40 age-matched German children. While German children passed both tasks, Samoan children failed the false-belief task a...

We investigated young infants’ object encoding and processing in response to isolated eye gaze cues on the neural and behavioral level. In two experiments, 4-month-old infants watched a pair of isolated eyes gazing towards or away from novel objects. Subsequently, the same objects were presented alone (i.e., without eyes). We measured event-related potentials (ERP) in response to object-directed and object-averted eye gaze as well as to the subsequently presented isolated objects. Using eye-tracking methods, we additionally measured infants’ looking behavior in reaction to the subsequently presented isolated objects. The ERP data revealed an enhanced slow wave positivity for object-directed eye gaze, indicating increased encoding of observed gaze cues. Regarding the objects, we found an enhanced Nc amplitude and increased looking times in response to previously uncued objects, indicating a novelty response on the neural and behavioral level. The results suggest that isolated eye gaze stimuli are sufficient to trigger object encoding and facilitate further object processing. Keywords: Infants, Eye tracking, Event-related potentials (ERP), Eye gaze, Isolated eyes

Seeking proximity to another person immediately expresses affiliative intentions. These are highly relevant after experiencing social exclusion. Through a novel task, the current study investigated the relation between proximity and observed ostracism during early childhood. A sample of 64 children (Mage = 58 months) first watched priming videos either depicting ostracism or not. Subsequently, children saw four seats of varying distances from an interactant’s seat and chose where to sit. Children who observed social exclusion selected seats with higher proximity. The results suggest that young preschoolers can immediately express the threatened need to belong by literally getting closer to even a stranger after witnessing ostracism. The task provides new opportunities to test reactions to social exclusion during early childhood.

The development of false belief understanding in Samoa was investigated in two studies testing more than 300 children. Children’s understanding was assessed with a change of location task. The results of study 1 suggest that Samoan children improve gradually and slowly, with no succeeding majority before 8 years of age. One third of the 10–13-year-olds still failed. Study 2 used a different translation among 55 children from 4–8 years of age and supports the former results. These findings speak for the cultural variability of theory of mind development and provide the first cross-cultural continuous survey on false belief understanding of children older than 5 years of age with a large sample in a place where mental states are no suitable object for conjecture.

This paper investigates the role of cause and effect relations for infants' learning about artifacts. Two experiments tested whether 12-month-olds categorized a given set of unfamiliar artifacts according to overall similarity and/or according to part similarity, depending on what kind of video demonstration was presented before the start of the categorization task. In both experiments, the actions performed with objects were accompanied by interesting effects but the causal relation between object-structure and effects was teased apart. In one video demonstration (Expt 1), the experimenter used the object part to produce some kind of effect in a causally plausible way. In another video demonstration (Expt 2), the experimenter performed similar actions with the same objects as in Expt 1, followed by the same effects as before. Importantly, however, no plausible cause-effect relation was provided this time. Only infants participating in Expt 1 categorized the set of unfamiliar objects according to part similarity. This finding suggests that 12-month-olds attend to the causal relation between specific object parts and their functional use when categorizing artifacts, rather than merely associating form-characteristics with an interesting effect.

Two experiments investigate whether 7-month-olds reason about the origin of motion events by considering two sources of causally relevant information: spatiotemporal cues and dispositional status information derived from the identification of an object as either animate (with the enduring causal property of self-initiated motion) or inanimate (requiring an external cause of motion). Infants were shown a ball, a human hand, and an animal engaged in a motion event. While dispositional status information remained constant, spatiotemporal relations varied across conditions. Based on looking time data, we conclude that infants attend flexibly to both types of information. Without spatiotemporal cues, infants rely on dispositional status information. When two objects provide dispositional cues to motion origin, but only one also provides corresponding spatiotemporal information, infants attribute the motion to the object providing both types of information. Given an ambiguous motion event with two dispositional motion originators but no additional spatiotemporal cues, infants may prefer either of the two.

Research in clinical samples suggests that the relationship between intelligence and academic achievement might be moderated by sustained attention. The present study aimed to explore whether this interaction could be observed in a non-clinical sample. We investigated a sample of 11th and 12th grade students ( N = 231). An overall performance score and a quality of performance score in sustained attention as well as verbal, numerical, and general intelligence scores served as predictors. Achievement criteria were grades in math and German as well as Grade Point Average (GPA) obtained after testing. Both types of sustained attention scores were significantly related to school performance, but only the quality of performance score incrementally contributed to the prediction of school performance above and beyond intelligence. Overall differences in the sustained attention test significantly moderated the relationship between verbal intelligence and German grades. Quality of performance moderated the relationship between general intelligence and GPA as well as the one between numerical intelligence and math grades. The study elucidates the interplay between sustained attention, intelligence, and school performance in a non-clinical sample.

Recent studies suggest that even infants attend to others’ beliefs in order to make sense of their behavior. To warrant the assumption of early belief understanding, corresponding competences need to be demonstrated in a variety of different belief-inducing situations. The present study provides corresponding evidence, using a completely nonverbal object-transfer task based on the general violation-of-expectation paradigm. A total of n = 36 infants (15-montholds) participated in one of three conditions. Infants saw an actor who either observed an object’s location change, did not observe it, or performed the location change manually without seeing it (i.e., variations in the actor’s information access). Results are in accordance with the assumption that 15-monthold infants master different belief-inducing situations in a highly flexible way, accepting visual as well as manual information access as a proper basis for belief induction.

This paper investigates the role of static and dynamic attributes for the animate–inanimate distinction in category-based reasoning of 7-month-olds. Three experiments tested infants’ responses to movement events involving an unfamiliar animal and a ball. When either the animal or the ball showed self-initiated irregular movements (Experiment 1), infants expected the previously active object to start moving again. When both objects were moving together in an ambiguous motion event (Experiment 2), infants expected only the animal to start moving again. Initial looking preferences for each object did not influence results. When either the facial features of the animal were removed, or its furry body was replaced by a plastic spiral in an ambiguous motion event (Experiment 3), infants formed no clear expectation regarding future movements. Based on this set of findings we conclude that 7-month-olds flexibly combine information about the static and dynamic properties of objects in order to reason about motion events.

Background/Aims: We investigated the links between maternal bonding, maternal anxiety disorders, and infant self-comforting behaviors. Furthermore, we looked at the moderating roles of infant gender and age. Methods: Our sample (n = 69) comprised 28 mothers with an anxiety disorder (according to DSM-IV criteria) and 41 controls, each with their 2.5- to 8-month-old infant (41 females and 28 males). Infant behaviors were recorded during the Face-to-Face Still-Face paradigm. Maternal bonding was assessed by the Postpartum Bonding Questionnaire. Results: Conditional process analyses revealed that lower maternal bonding partially mediated between maternal anxiety disorders and increased self-comforting behaviors but only in older female infants (over 5.5 months of age). However, considering maternal anxiety disorders without the influence of bonding, older female infants (over 5.5 months of age) showed decreased rates of self-comforting behaviors, while younger male infants (under 3 months of age) showed increased rates in the case of maternal anxiety disorder. Conclusions: The results suggest that older female infants (over 5.5 months of age) are more sensitive to lower maternal bonding in the context of maternal anxiety disorders. Furthermore, results suggest a different use of self-directed regulation strategies for male and female infants of mothers with anxiety disorders and low bonding, depending on infant age. The results are discussed in the light of gender-specific developmental trajectories.

This report examines whether knowledge about function influences the formation of artifact categories in 11-12- month old infants. Using an object-examination task, a set of artificial stimuli was presented that could either be grouped according to overall similarity or according to similarity in one functionally relevant part. Experiment 1 revealed that infants categorized the objects according to overall similarity but not part similarity under control conditions. Experiment 2 showed that after having seen the experimenter demonstrating the functional use of the critical part, infants later categorized the stimuli according to part similarity. When the same actions were performed without producing any effect, infants failed to categorize according to the critical part. This set of findings suggests that 11-12-month old infants use functional information as a cue to categorization.

We explore the role of eye movements in a chase detection task. Unlike the previous studies, which focused on overall performance as indicated by response speed and chase detection accuracy, we decompose the search process into gaze events such as smooth eye movements and use a data-driven approach to separately describe these gaze events. We measured eye movements of four human subjects engaged in a chase detection task displayed on a computer screen. The subjects were asked to detect two chasing rings among twelve other randomly moving rings. Using principal component analysis and support vector machines, we looked at the template and classification images that describe various stages of the detection process. We showed that the subjects mostly search for pairs of rings that move one after another in the same direction with a distance of 3.5-3.8 degrees. To find such pairs, the subjects first looked for regions with a high ring density and then pursued the rings in this region. Most of these groups consisted of two rings. Three subjects preferred to pursue the pair as a single object, while the remaining subject pursued the group by alternating the gaze between the two individual rings. In the discussion, we argue that subjects do not compare the movement of the pursued pair to a singular preformed template that describes a chasing motion. Rather, subjects bring certain hypotheses about what motion may qualify as chase and then, through feedback, they learn to look for a motion pattern that maximizes their performance.

We investigate the influence of perceived displacement of moving agent-like stimuli on the performance in dynamic interactive tasks. In order to reliably measure perceived displacement we utilize multiple tasks with different task demands. The perceived center of an agent’s body is displaced in the direction in which the agent is facing and this perceived displacement is larger than the theoretical position of the center of mass would predict. Furthermore, the displacement in the explicit judgment is dissociated from the displacement obtained by the implicit measures. By manipulating the location of the pivot point, we show that it is not necessary to postulate orientation as an additional cue utilized by perception, as has been suggested by earlier studies. These studies showed that the agent’s orientation influences the detection of chasing motion and the detection-related performance in interactive tasks. This influence has been labeled wolfpack effect. In one of the demonstrations of the wolfpack effect participants control a green circle on a display with a computer mouse. It has been shown that participants avoid display areas with agents pointing towards the green circle. Participants do so in favor of areas where the agents point in the direction perpendicular to the circle. We show that this avoidance behavior arises because the agent’s pivot point selected by the earlier studies is different from where people locate the center of agent’s body. As a consequence, the nominal rotation confounds rotation and translation. We show that the avoidance behavior disappears once the pivot point is set to the center of agent’s body.

A large body of research has documented infants’ ability to classify animate and inanimate objects based on static or dynamic information. It has been shown that infants less than one year of age transfer animacy-specific expectations from dynamic point-light displays to static images. The present study examined whether basic motion cues that typically trigger judgments of perceptual animacy in older children and adults lead 7-month-olds to infer an ambiguous object’s identity from dynamic information. Infants were tested with a novel paradigm that required inferring the animacy status of an ambiguous moving shape. An ambiguous shape emerged from behind a screen and its identity could only be inferred from its motion. Its motion pattern varied distinctively between scenes: it either changed speed and direction in an animate way, or it moved along a straight path at a constant speed (i.e. in an inanimate way). At test, the identity of the shape was revealed and it was either consistent or inconsistent with its motion pattern. Infants looked longer on trials with the inconsistent outcome. We conclude that 7-month-olds’ representations of animates and inanimates include category-specific associations between static and dynamic attributes. Moreover, these associations seem to hold for simple dynamic cues that are considered minimal conditions for animacy perception.

To enhance understanding of impaired socio-emotional development in children of postpartum depressed or anxious mothers, this longitudinal study addressed the question of whether maternal postpartum depression and anxiety disorders result in deficits in children’s processing of facial emotional expressions (FEEs) at pre-school age. Thirty-two mothers who had fulfilled Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV (DSM-IV) criteria for postpartum depression and/or anxiety disorder and their pre-school aged children were tested for FEE processing abilities and compared to a healthy control group (n = 29). Child assessments included separate tasks for emotion recognition and emotion labelling. Mothers completed an emotion recognition test as well as the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV Axis I Disorders I (SCID-I). Children of postpartum depressed and/or anxious mothers performed significantly worse than control children at labelling, but not at recognizing facial expressions of basic emotions. Emotion labelling at pre-school age was predicted by child age and maternal postpartum mental health, but neither current maternal mental health nor current maternal emotion recognition was associated with child FEE processing. Results point to a specific importance of early social experiences for the development of FEE labelling skills. However, further studies involving sensitive measures of emotion recognition are needed to determine if there might also exist subtle effects on FEE recognition.

This paper investigates the role of cause and effect relations for infants' learning about artifacts. Two experiments tested whether 12-month-olds categorized a given set of unfamiliar artifacts according to overall similarity and/or according to part similarity, depending on what kind of video demonstration was presented before the start of the categorization task. In both experiments, the actions performed with objects were accompanied by interesting effects but the causal relation between object-structure and effects was teased apart. In one video demonstration (Expt 1), the experimenter used the object part to produce some kind of effect in a causally plausible way. In another video demonstration (Expt 2), the experimenter performed similar actions with the same objects as in Expt 1, followed by the same effects as before. Importantly, however, no plausible cause-effect relation was provided this time. Only infants participating in Expt 1 categorized the set of unfamiliar objects according to part similarity. This finding suggests that 12-month-olds attend to the causal relation between specific object parts and their functional use when categorizing artifacts, rather than merely associating form-characteristics with an interesting effect.