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Findings on the emergence and interpretation of early object representation in the first year of life diverge widely between designs that employ looking times versus action-based measures. As a promising new approach, pupillometry has produced evidence for object permanence at 18 months of age, but not younger as of yet. In the current study, we (re)investigated object permanence following occlusion events in a pupillometric violation-of-expectation paradigm optimized for younger infants. During each trial, infants observed a toy object's occlusion and prompt reveal in the expected condition or its absence in the unexpected condition. Across two experiments, we show that 10- and 12-month-old infants' (total N = 82) pupils dilate in response to unexpected object disappearances relative to expected appearances. Control analyses revealed no differences between the scenes before the experimental manipulation, excluding perceptual interpretations. We further report an age-dependent effect of condition on pupil responses, with unexpected outcomes triggering greater pupil dilation in the older group. These results provide positive pupillometric evidence in support of object permanence in the context of a violation-of-expectation paradigm at 10 and 12 months of age., (Copyright © 2024 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Research on goal-predictive gaze shifts in infancy so far has mostly focused on the effect of infants' experience with observed actions or the effect of agency cues that the observed agent displays. However, the perspective from which an action is presented to the infants (egocentric vs. allocentric) has received only little attention from researchers despite the fact that the natural observation of own actions is always linked to an egocentric perspective, whereas the observation of others' actions is often linked to an allocentric perspective. The current study investigated the timing of 6-, 9-, and 12-month-olds' goal-predictive gaze behavior, as well as that of adults, during the observation of simple human grasping actions that were presented from either an egocentric or allocentric perspective (within-participants design). The results showed that at 6 and 9 months of age, the infants predicted the action goal only when observing the action from the egocentric perspective. The 12-month-olds and adults, in contrast, predicted the action in both perspectives. The results therefore are in line with accounts proposing an advantage of egocentric versus allocentric processing of social stimuli, at least early in development. This study is among the first to show this egocentric bias already during the first year of life., (Copyright © 2024 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

• Complexity of play predicts infants' capacity to solve means-end problems. • This link does not depend on whether the problem involves the use of tools. • We compared tool and non-tool means-end problem-solving of similar difficulty. Tool use is primarily, but not exclusively, present in species with otherwise advanced cognitive traits. However, the interaction between such traits and conspecific inter-individual variation in the presence, complexity, or intensity of tool use is far from being established. We addressed this matter among human infants, seeking factors that relate to differences in tool use. We examined, both correlationally and experimentally, whether the propensity to engage in object combinations predicts performance in means–end problem-solving tasks involving or not involving the use of a tool. We tested 71 infants aged 15, 18, 21, and 24 months, dividing them into two subgroups: one exposed to an adult demonstrating object–object combinations (i.e., "prompting" infants to combine objects together) and another with comparable social exposure but where the adult demonstrated single-object manipulations. We found a correlation between the combined level of spontaneous and prompted object combinations and problem-solving performance regardless of the involvement of tools in the problem. However, we did not find differences in tool-use performance between the two demonstration subgroups. The correlational analysis suggests that complexity of play, as measured by the frequency of combining objects, is linked to infants' problem-solving skills rather than being specifically associated with tool use, as previously suggested in the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Six- to nine-month-olds but not nine- to fourteen-month-olds born amid the COVID-19 pandemic recognized unmasked own-race faces. • Ten to fourteen-month-olds but not Six- to nine-month-olds born amid the COVID-19 pandemic recognized masked own-race faces. • The COVID-19 pandemic restrictions have drastically limited infants' experience with faces. • The COVID-19 pandemic restrictions led to the altered development of face processing abilities in infancy. To effectively contain the spread of COVID-19, public health agencies mandated special regulations. Although they protected us from COVID-19, these restrictions have inevitably changed the environment around us. It remains unclear how these changes may have affected early cognitive development among infants born during the pandemic. Thus, this study examined how the COVID-19 restrictions have affected infants' face recognition ability, a hallmark of their cognitive capacities. Specifically, we used the familiarization and visual pair comparison paradigm to examine face recognition performance among infants aged 6 to 14 months amid the second wave of the pandemic (February to July 2021). Experiment 1 investigated the recognition of unmasked faces and found that only younger infants, but not older infants, recognized faces by showing a novelty preference. Experiment 2 examined the recognition of faces wearing masks and found that only older infants, but not younger ones, recognized faces by exhibiting a familiarity preference. These results suggest that with limited interactions during the pandemic, infants could have developed an overly specialized face processing ability that failed to recognize the faces of strangers. Moreover, infants could have obtained more information on masked faces during the pandemic and adapted to the current situation. In Expreiment 3, we further confirmed the restriction on infants' interpersonal experiences with a survey conducted both before and during the pandemic. Overall, these findings demonstrated how the pandemic altered early perceptual development and further confirmed that interpersonal experiences during infancy are critical in their cognitive development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Perceiving motion in depth is important in everyday life, especially motion in relation to the body. Visual and auditory cues inform us about motion in space when presented in isolation from each other, but the most comprehensive information is obtained through the combination of both of these cues. We traced the development of infants' ability to discriminate between visual motion trajectories across peripersonal space and to match these with auditory cues specifying the same peripersonal motion. We measured 5-month-old (n = 20) and 9-month-old (n = 20) infants' visual preferences for visual motion toward or away from their body (presented simultaneously and side by side) across three conditions: (a) visual displays presented alone, (b) paired with a sound increasing in intensity, and (c) paired with a sound decreasing in intensity. Both groups preferred approaching motion in the visual-only condition. When the visual displays were paired with a sound increasing in intensity, neither group showed a visual preference. When a sound decreasing in intensity was played instead, the 5-month-olds preferred the receding (spatiotemporally congruent) visual stimulus, whereas the 9-month-olds preferred the approaching (spatiotemporally incongruent) visual stimulus. We speculate that in the approaching sound condition, the behavioral salience of the sound could have led infants to focus on the auditory information alone, in order to prepare a motor response, and to neglect the visual stimuli. In the receding sound condition, instead, the difference in response patterns in the two groups may have been driven by infants' emerging motor abilities and their developing predictive processing mechanisms supporting and influencing each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• This study tested the effect of decontextualised talk (DT) on child literacy and math. • DT in infancy was negatively linked with child reading in middle childhood. • DT in preschool years positively related to child outcomes in middle childhood. • Using DT with children may positively influence early literacy and math skills. Children's literacy and numeracy skills are fundamental for early academic performance and later academic success, mental health, and employment prospects in adulthood. Given that parents play a key role in promoting child development, identifying early parenting behaviors that predict literacy and numeracy skills is a research imperative. Emerging evidence suggests that parental use of decontextualized language (DL)—talk that requires cognitive abstraction and transcends the here and now—predicts children's literacy skills. However, its relation to numeracy remains underexplored. Accordingly, the current study examined how DL during interaction with children in infancy (T 1) and preschool years (T 2) relates to child literacy and numeracy in middle childhood (T 3). Participants were 26 Irish mother–father–child triads (16 female children). At T 1 and T 2 , participants engaged in 5-min interactions that were coded for DL. At T 3 , child literacy and numeracy were assessed using the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children–Fourth Edition and teacher report of child scores on national standardized tests. Controlling for child age and contextualized utterances, child reading in middle childhood was negatively related to maternal and child DL in infancy but was positively related to DL during preschool years, suggesting that the benefits of DL may become apparent later in development. Mothers', fathers', and children's DL during preschool years was also positively linked with child numeracy in middle childhood. Thus, embedding DL in conversation with children may have positive domain-specific and cross-domain effects on children's literacy and numeracy performance. Findings provide incentive for future research to examine relations between DL and children's school performance across a wider range of developmental domains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Early poverty-related risk is negatively associated with sustained attention in infancy. • Infant sustained attention is positively related to multiple domains of self-regulation in pre-kindergarten. • Poverty-related risk during infancy predicted lower self-regulation, partially, through infant sustained attention. There are many avenues by which early life poverty relates to the development of school readiness. Few studies, however, have examined the extent to which sustained attention, a central component of self-regulation in infancy, mediates relations between poverty-related risk and cognitive and emotional self-regulation at school entry. To investigate longitudinal relations among poverty-related risk, sustained attention in infancy, and self-regulation prior to school entry, we analyzed data from the Family Life Project, a large prospective longitudinal sample (N = 1292) of children and their primary caregivers in predominantly low-income and nonurban communities. We used structural equation modeling to assess the extent to which a latent variable of infant sustained attention, measured in a naturalistic setting, mediated the associations between cumulative poverty-related risk and three domains of self-regulation. We constructed a latent variable of infant sustained attention composed of a measure of global sustained attention and a task-based sustained attention measure at 7 and 15 months of age. Results indicated that infant sustained attention was negatively associated with poverty-related risk and positively associated with a direct assessment of executive function abilities and teacher-reported effortful control and emotion regulation in pre-kindergarten. Mediation analysis indicated that the association between poverty-related risk and each self-regulation outcome was partially mediated by infant attention. These results provide support for a developmental model of self-regulation whereby attentional abilities in infancy act as a mechanism linking the effects of early-life socioeconomic adversity with multiple aspects of self-regulation in early childhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• 11-month-olds selectively mimicked facial actions of native over foreign speakers. • This selective mimicry was accompanied by greater left temporal parietal cortex activation. • Facial mimicry is influenced by cues to group membership in the first year of life. Mimicry, the spontaneous copying of others' behaviors, plays an important role in social affiliation, with adults selectively mimicking in-group members over out-group members. Despite infants' early documented sensitivity to cues to group membership, previous work suggests that it is not until 4 years of age that spontaneous mimicry is modulated by group status. Here we demonstrate that mimicry is sensitive to cues to group membership at a much earlier age if the cues presented are more relevant to infants. 11-month-old infants observed videos of facial actions (e.g., mouth opening, eyebrow raising) performed by models who either spoke the infants' native language or an unfamiliar foreign language while we measured activation of the infants' mouth and eyebrow muscle regions using electromyography to obtain an index of mimicry. We simultaneously used functional near-infrared spectroscopy to investigate the neural mechanisms underlying differential mimicry responses. We found that infants showed greater facial mimicry of the native speaker compared to the foreign speaker and that the left temporal parietal cortex was activated more strongly during the observation of facial actions performed by the native speaker compared to the foreign speaker. Although the exact mechanisms underlying this selective mimicry response will need to be investigated in future research, these findings provide the first demonstration of the modulation of facial mimicry by cues to group status in preverbal infants and suggest that the foundations for the role that mimicry plays in facilitating social bonds seem to be present during the first year of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • The work indicates that the intersensory correspondence between auditory pitch and spatial height can support young infants' perception of object persistence across occlusion. • The results indicate that auditory information for location can support perception of persistence of an object moving on a vertical trajectory. • This is the first demonstration that an intersensory correspondence supports veridical perception by infants. Abstract Perception of object persistence across occlusion emerges at around 4 months of age for objects moving horizontally or vertically. In addition, congruent auditory information for movement enhances perception of persistence of an object moving horizontally. In two experiments, we examined the effect of presenting bimodal (visual and auditory) sensory information, both congruently and incongruently, for a vertical moving object occlusion event. A total of 68 4-month-old infants (34 girls) were tested for perception of persistence of an object moving up and down, passing at each translation behind a centrally placed occluder. Infants were exposed to these visual events accompanied by no sound, spatially colocated sound, or congruent or incongruent pitch–height correspondence sounds. Both spatially colocated and congruent pitch–height auditory information enhanced perception of trajectory continuity. However, no impairment occurred when pitch–height sound information was presented incongruently. These results highlight the importance of taking a multisensory approach to infant perceptual development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • Infants showed similar perception narrowing in face and speech domains. • Narrowing in face and speech were not correlated at 6 months. • Narrowing in face and speech were negatively correlated at 9 months. • Narrowing in face and speech were positively correlated at 12 months. Abstract Although prior research has established that perceptual narrowing reflects the influence of experience on the development of face and speech processing, it is unclear whether narrowing in the two domains is related. A within-participant design ( N = 72) was used to investigate discrimination of own- and other-race faces and native and non-native speech sounds in 3-, 6-, 9-, and 12-month-old infants. For face and speech discrimination, whereas 3-month-olds discriminated own-race faces and native speech sounds as well as other-race faces and non-native speech sounds, older infants discriminated only own-race faces and native speech sounds. Narrowing in face and narrowing in speech were not correlated at 6 months, negatively correlated at 9 months, and positively correlated at 12 months. The findings reveal dynamic developmental changes in the relation between modalities during the first year of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Perceiving and understanding the emotions of those around us is an imperative skill to develop early in life. An infant’s family environment provides most of their emotional exemplars in early development. However, the relation between the early development of emotion perception and family expressiveness remains understudied. To investigate this potential link to early emotion perception development, we examined 38 infants at 9 months of age. We assessed infants’ ability to match emotions across facial and vocal modalities using an intermodal matching paradigm for angry–neutral, happy–neutral, and sad–neutral pairings. We also attained family expressiveness information via parent report. Our results indicate a significant positive relation between emotion matching and family expressiveness specific to the happy–neutral condition. However, we found no evidence for emotion matching for the infants as a group in any of the three conditions. These results suggest that family expressiveness does relate to emotion matching for the earliest developing emotional category among 9-month-old infants and that emotion matching with multiple emotions at this age is a challenging task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current study used an object manipulation task to explore whether infants rely more on consonant information than on vowel information when learning new words even when the words start with a vowel. Canadian French-learning 20-month-olds, who were taught pairs of new vowel-initial words contrasted either on their initial vowel ( opsi / eupsi ) or following consonant ( oupsa / outsa ), were found to have learned the words only in the consonant condition and performed significantly better in the consonant condition than in the vowel condition. These results extend to Canadian French-learning infants the consonant bias in word learning previously found in French-learning infants from France and, crucially, shows that vocalic information has less weight than consonant information in new word learning even when it is the initial sound of the target words, confirming the consonant bias at the lexical level postulated by Nespor et al. (2003). The current findings also suggest that French-learning infants are able to segment vowel-initial words as early as 20 months of age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adults expect distributive justice—that rewards are distributed according to the principles of equality and equity. Previous research has demonstrated that preschool-aged children are sensitive to distributive justice, yet the age at which these sensitivities emerge remains unknown. The current research demonstrates that 17-month-old infants ( N  = 84) expect individuals to distribute shared resources based on the amount of work each partner contributed to attain the resources. These findings provide evidence that sensitivity to two principles of distributive justice, equity and equality, emerges much earlier than has previously been suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current study showed that 3-month-old infants attributed a preference to a human agent, with her face and upper body visible, when she consistently reached for and grasped one of two objects with her bare hand. In contrast, infants did not appear to interpret the agent’s same actions of grasping the object as indicative of her preference when it was the only object present or when it hid the other object from her but not from the infants. These results suggest that even from an early age, infants interpret human agents’ actions in terms of mental states such as goals and preferences. In light of the current results, mechanisms for early psychological understanding are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The onset of independent prehension marks the beginning of infants’ direct interaction with the physical world. The success infants have in contacting objects with their hands and arms can have both visual and auditory consequences; objects may move and collide with other objects or fall onto table surfaces. Seeing and hearing these events could have important consequences for infants’ learning about objects and their subsequent behavior toward objects. The current research assessed the effects of brief object manipulation experiences and how a specific characteristic of training, auditory feedback produced by hard plastic toys colliding with a tabletop surface, affects pre-reaching infants’ subsequent object exploration. In Experiment 1, infants participated in either active “sticky” mittens training or passive “nonsticky” mittens training with a set of toys; before and after this experience, infants explored a teether. Results showed that infants participating in active training increased looking toward and sustained touching of the teether from pre- to post-training, whereas infants receiving passive training decreased their looking toward and touching of the teether following training. To investigate whether infants’ exploration behaviors were related to the amount of auditory feedback produced by the objects during training, in Experiment 2 data were collected from infants who received active sticky mittens training that had either more or less auditory feedback potential. Results showed more robust increases in infants’ exploratory activity from pre- to post-training in the more auditory feedback condition compared with infants’ exploratory activity in the less auditory feedback condition. These findings support the idea that active control of objects, including experiencing contingent feedback through multiple sensory modalities, promotes the development of object exploration during early infancy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The ability to process expressive facial movements developed in the first year of life. • Nine-month-olds could perceive happy from facial movements. • Three-month-olds perceived lower-level visual properties in facial movements. • Experience shapes infants' ability to perceive emotions from facial movements. Perceiving facial expressions is an essential ability for infants. Although previous studies indicated that infants could perceive emotion from expressive facial movements, the developmental change of this ability remains largely unknown. To exclusively examine infants' processing of facial movements, we used point-light displays (PLDs) to present emotionally expressive facial movements. Specifically, we used a habituation and visual paired comparison (VPC) paradigm to investigate whether 3-, 6-, and 9-month-olds could discriminate between happy and fear PLDs after being habituated with a happy PLD (happy-habituation condition) or a fear PLD (fear-habituation condition). The 3-month-olds discriminated between the happy and fear PLDs in both the happy- and fear-habituation conditions. The 6- and 9-month-olds showed discrimination only in the happy-habituation condition but not in the fear-habituation condition. These results indicated a developmental change in processing expressive facial movements. Younger infants tended to process low-level motion signals regardless of the depicted emotions, and older infants tended to process expressions, which emerged in familiar facial expressions (e.g., happy). Additional analyses of individual difference and eye movement patterns supported this conclusion. In Experiment 2, we concluded that the findings of Experiment 1 were not due to a spontaneous preference for fear PLDs. Using inverted PLDs, Experiment 3 further suggested that 3-month-olds have already perceived PLDs as face-like stimuli. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Language provides information about our psychological states. For instance, adults can use language to convey information about their goals or preferences. The current research examined whether 14- and 12-month-old infants could interpret a change in an agent’s word as signaling a change in her goals. In two experiments, 14-month-olds (Experiment 1) and 12-month-olds (Experiment 2) were first familiarized to an event in which an agent uttered a novel word and then reached for one of two novel objects. During the test trials, the agent uttered a different novel word (different-word condition) or the same word (same-word condition) and then reached for the same object or the other object. Both 14- and 12-month-olds in the different-word condition expected the agent to change her goal and reach for the other object. In contrast, the infants in the same-word condition expected the agent to maintain her goal. In Experiment 3, 12-month-olds who heard two distinct sounds instead of the agent’s novel words expected the agent to maintain her goal regardless of the change in the nonlinguistic sounds. Together, these results indicate that by 12 months of age infants can use an agent’s verbal information to detect a change in her goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this first study of the impact of sleep on infants’ problem solving of a locomotor task, 28 newly walking infants who were within a week of having given up crawling trained to navigate a shoulder-height tunnel to reach a caregiver waiting at the end. During the transitional window between crawling and walking, infants are reluctant to return to crawling, making this task uniquely challenging. Infants were randomly assigned to either nap or stay awake during a delay between training and a later test session. For the Nap group, efficiency of problem solving improved from training to test, but there was no change for the No Nap group. These findings suggest that for newly walking infants, sleep facilitates learning to solve a novel motor problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much research has focused on how infants respond to emotional facial expressions. One of the key findings in this area of research is that by 7 months of age, but not younger, infants show a bias in processing fearful faces even when compared with other negative and novel facial expressions. A recent study by Heck and colleagues ( Journal of Experimental Child Psychology , 2016, Vol. 147, pp. 100–110) challenges this idea by showing that 5-month-olds looked longer at fearful faces than at happy and at neutral faces when dynamic displays (videos) are used. Given that previous work failed to find enhanced attention to fearful faces in 5-month-olds using static displays (photographs), this was taken as evidence that biased attention to fear can be observed earlier when dynamic information is presented. However, we computed an analysis indicating that the overall amount of motion displayed in the videos in Heck and colleagues’ study is confounded with emotion such that the greatest amount of motion is evident in the fearful face videos and may have driven infants’ looking patterns. We discuss these findings and their limitations in the context of other research using dynamic emotion stimuli. Although these findings do not rule out the possibility that 5-month-olds are sensitive to fear, we stress the need to control for physical differences such as motion before any conclusions regarding the emergence of the fear bias during infancy can be drawn and in order to improve research practice in the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Language learners must differentiate visual details that are distinguished lexically in their language. • Monolingual infants demonstrate sensitivity to non-lexical visual cues at 14 months, followed by a decline at 19 months. • Bilingual infants were tested on their sensitivity to non-lexical visual cues at 14-, 19- and 24 months. • Bilingual infants demonstrated postponed sensitivities as well as increased flexibility relative to monolingual infants. It is well known that infants undergo developmental change in how they respond to language-relevant visual contrasts. For example, when viewing motion events, infants' sensitivities to background information ("ground-path cues," e.g., whether a background is flat and continuous or bounded) change with age. Prior studies with English and Japanese monolingual infants have demonstrated that 14-month-old infants discriminate between motion events that take place against different ground-paths (e.g., an unbounded field vs a bounded street). By 19 months of age, this sensitivity becomes more selective in monolingual infants; only learners of languages that lexically contrast these categories, such as Japanese, discriminate between such events. In this study, we investigated this progression in bilingual infants. We first replicated past reports of an age-related decline in ground-path sensitivity from 14 to 19 months in English monolingual infants living in a multilingual society. English–Mandarin bilingual infants living in that same society were then tested on discrimination of ground-path cues at 14, 19, and 24 months. Although neither the English nor Mandarin language differentiates motion events based on ground-path cues, bilingual infants demonstrated protracted sensitivity to these cues. Infants exhibited a lack of discrimination at 14 months, followed by discrimination at 19 months and a subsequent decline in discrimination at 24 months. In addition, bilingual infants demonstrated more fine-grained sensitivities to subtle ground cues not observed in monolingual infants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Nine-month-olds have expect a bystander to punish to unfair distributors and reward fair distributors. • These results reveal early-emerging expectations about punshments and rewards in third-party contexts. • These findings are consistent with the view that the principle of fairness is an evolved adaptation. Rewarding individuals who distribute resources fairly and punishing those who distribute resources unfairly may be very important actions for fostering cooperation. This study investigated whether 9-month-olds have some expectations concerning punishments and rewards that follow distributive actions. Infants were shown simple animations and were tested using the violation-of-expectation paradigm. In Experiment 1, we found that infants looked longer when they saw a bystander delivering a corporal punishment to a 'fair distributor,' who distributed some windfall resources equally to the possible recipients, rather than to an 'unfair distributor,' who distributed the resources unequally. This pattern of looking times was reversed when, in Experiment 2, punishments were replaced with rewards. These findings suggest an early emergence of expectations about punishing and rewarding actions in third-party contexts, and they help to evaluate competing claims about the origins of a sense of fairness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Infants' gaze following was measured using a synchronous online testing procedure. • Infants followed a virtual gaze when the partner had open rather than closed eyes. • Social cues provided in a live-interactive virtual setup are as effective as in the lab. • This paradigm enables a new way to explore social development remotely. From 10 months of age, human infants start to understand the function of the eyes in the looking behavior of others to the point where they preferentially orient toward an object if the social partner has open eyes rather than closed eyes. Thus far, gaze following has been investigated in controlled laboratory paradigms. The current study investigated this early ability using a remote live testing procedure, testing infants in their everyday environment while manipulating whether the experimenter could or could not see some target objects. A total of 32 11- and 12-month-old infants' looking behavior was assessed, varying the experimenter's eye status condition (open eyes vs closed eyes) in a between-participant design. Results showed that infants followed the gaze of a virtual social partner and that they preferentially followed open eyes rather than closed eyes. These data generalize past laboratory findings to a noisier home environment and demonstrate gaze processing capacities of infants to a virtual partner interacting with the participants in a live setup. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Infants used the reliability (i.e., transitivity) of a human agent's object choices to inform their selective trust and imitation of her. • Infants imitated the transitive but not the intransitive agent's head-touch actions to illuminate a light-box. • These results add support that young children's epistemic trust is guided by their conceptual understanding. This study examined how the reliability (i.e., transitivity) of an agent's object choices affects 16-month-old infants' (N = 48) imitation of her unconventional way of turning on a touch light box with her head when her hands were available. When the agent made transitive choices (i.e., she chose Object A over Object B, Object B over Object C, and then A over C), infants imitated her head touch actions. When the agent made intransitive choices (i.e., after choosing A over B and B over C, she chose C over A), infants were more likely to use only their hands to touch the light box. In addition, when it was presumably difficult for infants to judge the transitivity of the agent's choices (i.e., she chose B over C, A over B, and then A over C), they used their hands more. These results demonstrate that infants' understanding informs their decisions to selectively imitate others' specific ways to act on novel artifacts, consistent with young children's selective trust in information provided by other people based on their epistemic reliability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do infants’ emerging language abilities affect their organization of objects into categories? The question of whether labels can shape the early perceptual categories formed by young infants has received considerable attention, but evidence has remained inconclusive. Here, 10-month-old infants ( N = 80) were familiarized with a series of morphed stimuli along a continuum that can be seen as either one category or two categories. Infants formed one category when the stimuli were presented in silence or paired with the same label, but they divided the stimulus set into two categories when half of the stimuli were paired with one label and half with another label. Pairing the stimuli with two different nonlinguistic sounds did not lead to the same result. In this case, infants showed evidence for the formation of a single category, indicating that nonlinguistic sounds do not cause infants to divide a category. These results suggest that labels and visual perceptual information interact in category formation, with labels having the potential to constructively shape category structures already in preverbal infants, and that nonlinguistic sounds do not have the same effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anti-fat prejudice (weight bias, obesity stigma) is strong, prevalent, and increasing in adults and is associated with negative outcomes for those with obesity. However, it is unknown how early in life this prejudice forms and the reasons for its development. We examined whether infants and toddlers might display an anti-fat bias and, if so, whether it was influenced by maternal anti-fat attitudes through a process of social learning. Mother–child dyads ( N = 70) split into four age groups participated in a preferential looking paradigm whereby children were presented with 10 pairs of average and obese human figures in random order, and their viewing times (preferential looking) for the figures were measured. Mothers’ anti-fat prejudice and education were measured along with mothers’ and fathers’ body mass index (BMI) and children’s television viewing time. We found that older infants ( M = 11 months) had a bias for looking at the obese figures, whereas older toddlers ( M = 32 months) instead preferred looking at the average-sized figures. Furthermore, older toddlers’ preferential looking was correlated significantly with maternal anti-fat attitudes. Parental BMI, education, and children’s television viewing time were unrelated to preferential looking. Looking times might signal a precursor to explicit fat prejudice socialized via maternal anti-fat attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the importance of children’s self-regulation, relations were examined between two fundamental components of self-regulation, specifically temperamentally based reactivity and regulation. Infant negative emotional reactivity and regulation, measured via frontal electroencephalogram (EEG) asymmetry, were examined as potential precursors to understanding toddlerhood regulation, conceptualized as effortful control. Our longitudinal design allowed for examination of two perspectives on the interplay of reactivity and regulation, namely that (a) early negative affectivity interferes with the development of later regulation and (b) regulation is necessary to modulate negative affectivity and, thus, would buffer the effects of negative affectivity on later regulation. Mother–child dyads participated in a three-wave longitudinal study. Baseline frontal EEG asymmetry was assessed at 10 months (T1). Mothers rated children’s negative reactivity at both 10 and 24 months (T2). Children’s effortful control, measured at 30–36 months (T3), was a composite score of maternal ratings and observed behavior during a snack delay. Negative affectivity was related to effortful control; however, significant interactions between negative affect and frontal EEG asymmetry were found. Higher levels of negative affectivity at both T1 and T2 were associated with lower levels of effortful control at T3, but only for toddlers who also had right frontal EEG asymmetry. Negative affectivity was not associated with effortful control for the left frontal EEG asymmetry group. Our moderation findings highlight the complex relations of negative affect and frontal EEG asymmetry in understanding children’s development of self-regulation, specifically effortful control. The interaction between early reactivity and physiological regulation indicates that both may be important precursors of effortful control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From early in life, emotion detection plays an important role during social interactions. Recently, 7-month-old infants have been shown to process facial signs of fear in others without conscious perception and solely on the basis of their eyes. However, it is not known whether unconscious fear processing from eyes is present before 7 months of age or only emerges at around 7 months. To investigate this question, we measured 5-month-old infants’ event-related potentials (ERPs) in response to subliminally presented fearful and non-fearful eyes and compared these with 7-month-old infants’ ERP responses from a previous study. Our ERP results revealed that only 7-month-olds, but not 5-month-olds, distinguished between fearful and non-fearful eyes. Specifically, 7-month-olds’ processing of fearful eyes was reflected in early visual processes over occipital cortex and later attentional processes over frontal cortex. This suggests that, in line with prior work on the conscious detection of fearful faces, the brain processes associated with the unconscious processing of fearful eyes develop between 5 and 7 months of age. More generally, these findings support the notion that emotion perception and the underlying brain processes undergo critical change during the first year of life. Therefore, the current data provide further evidence for viewing infancy as a formative period in human socioemotional functioning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current theoretical conceptualizations of regulatory development suggest that attention processes and emotion regulation processes share common neurophysiological underpinnings and behavioral antecedents such that emotion regulation abilities may build on early attentional skills. To further elucidate this proposed relationship, we tested whether early neurophysiological processes measured during an attention task in infancy predicted in-task attention behavior and whether infants’ attention behavior was subsequently associated with their ability to regulate emotion during early childhood ( N = 388). Results indicated that greater electroencephalogram (EEG) power change (from baseline to task) at medial frontal locations (F3 and F4) during an attention task at 10 months of age was associated with concurrent observed behavioral attention. Specifically, greater change in EEG power at the right frontal location (F4) was associated with more attention and greater EEG power at the left frontal location (F3) was associated with less attention, indicating a potential right hemisphere specialization for attention processes already present during the first year of life. In addition, after controlling for 5-month attention behavior, increased behavioral attention at 10 months was negatively associated with children’s observed frustration to emotional challenge at 3 years of age. Finally, the indirect effects from 10-month EEG power change at F3 and F4 to 3-year emotion regulation via infants’ 10-month behavioral attention were significant, suggesting that infants’ attention behavior is one mechanism through which early neurophysiological activity is related to emotion regulation abilities during childhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Curiosity induced by uncertainty enhances learning of unrelated information in 8-month-old infants. • 8-month-old infants do not seek resolution of curiosity over experiencing novelty. • This is the first empirical study to explore how states of curiosity affect object encoding in infants and the role of curiosity resolution in this process. • Our results suggest that curiosity increases the state of arousal, facilitating learning in infants. • Overall, we suggest curiosity changes in infants from a broader state of arousal to more goal-directed information seeking in older children and adults. Recent research with adults indicates that curiosity induced by uncertainty enhances learning and memory outcomes and that the resolution of curiosity has a special role in curiosity-driven learning. However, the role of curiosity-based learning in early development is unclear. Here we presented 8-month-old infants with a novel looking time procedure to explore (a) whether uncertainty-induced curiosity enhances learning of incidental information and (b) whether uncertainty-induced curiosity leads infants to seek uncertainty resolution over novelty. In Experiment 1, infants saw blurred images to induce curiosity (Curiosity sequence) or a clear image (Non-curiosity sequence) followed by presentation of incidental objects. Despite looking equally to the incidental objects in both sequences, in a subsequent object recognition phase infants looked longer to incidental objects presented in the Non-curiosity condition compared with the Curiosity condition, indicating that curiosity induced by blurred pictures enhanced the processing of the incidental object, leading to a novelty preference for the incidental object shown in the Non-Curiosity condition. In Experiment 2, a blurred picture of a novel toy was first presented, followed by its corresponding clear picture paired with a clear picture of a new novel toy side by side. Infants showed no preference for either image, providing no evidence for a drive to resolve uncertainty. Overall, the current experiments suggest that curiosity has a broad attention-enhancing effect in infancy. Taking into account existing studies with older children and adults, we propose a developmental change in the function of curiosity, from this attentional enhancement to more goal-directed information seeking in older children and adults. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Adults use consonants more than vowels in words, andthe development of this consonant bias varies cross linguistically. • Spanish infants 'use of consonants vs. vowels in word recognition was assessed at 5, 8.5 and 12 months of age. • As for Italian and French, the consonant bias emerges during the first year of life in this third Romance language. • Therefore, specific factors common to Romance languages may be driving an early consonant bias in lexical processing. • This study contributes to a better understanding of how language specific factors impact infants' quest for words. The consonant bias is evidenced by a greater reliance on consonants over vowels in lexical processing. Although attested during adulthood for most Roman and Germanic languages (e.g., French, Italian, English, Dutch), evidence on its development suggests that the native input modulates its trajectory. French and Italian learners exhibit an early switch from a higher reliance on vowels at 5 and 6 months of age to a consonant bias by the end of the first year. This study investigated the developmental trajectory of this bias in a third Romance language unexplored so far—Spanish. In a central visual fixation procedure, infants aged 5, 8½, and 12 months were tested in a word recognition task. In Experiment 1, infants preferred listening to frequent words (e.g., leche, milk) over nonwords (e.g., machi) at all ages. Experiment 2 assessed infants' listening times to consonant and vowel alterations of the words used in Experiment 1. Here, 5-month-olds preferred listening to consonant alterations, whereas 12-month-olds preferred listening to vowel alterations, suggesting that 5-month-olds' recognition performance was more affected by a vowel alteration (e.g., leche → lache), whereas 12-month-olds' recognition performance was more affected by a consonant alteration (e.g., leche → keche). These findings replicate previous findings in Italian and French and generalize them to a third Romance language (Spanish). As such, they support the idea that specific factors common to Romance languages might be driving an early consonant bias in lexical processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do words affect categorization? According to some accounts, even early in development words are category markers and are different from other features. According to other accounts, early in development words are part of the input and are akin to other features. The current study addressed this issue by examining the role of words and dynamic visual features in category learning in 8- to 12-month-old infants. Infants were familiarized with exemplars from one category in a label-defined or motion-defined condition and then tested with prototypes from the studied category and from a novel contrast category. Eye-tracking results indicated that infants exhibited better category learning in the motion-defined condition than in the label-defined condition, and their attention was more distributed among different features when there was a dynamic visual feature compared with the label-defined condition. These results provide little evidence for the idea that linguistic labels are category markers that facilitate category learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous preferential listening studies suggest that 11-month-olds’ early word representations are phonologically detailed, such that minor phonetic variations (i.e., mispronunciations) impair recognition. However, these studies focused on infants’ sensitivity to mispronunciations (or omissions) of consonants, which have been proposed to be more important for lexical identity than vowels. Even though a lexically related consonant advantage has been consistently found in French from 14 months of age onward, little is known about its developmental onset. The current study asked whether French-learning 11-month-olds exhibit a consonant–vowel asymmetry when recognizing familiar words, which would be reflected in vowel mispronunciations being more tolerated than consonant mispronunciations. In a baseline experiment (Experiment 1), infants preferred listening to familiar words over nonwords, confirming that at 11 months of age infants show a familiarity effect rather than a novelty effect. In Experiment 2, which was constructed using the familiar words of Experiment 1, infants preferred listening to one-feature vowel mispronunciations over one-feature consonant mispronunciations. Given the familiarity preference established in Experiment 1, this pattern of results suggests that recognition of early familiar words is more dependent on their consonants than on their vowels. This adds another piece of evidence that, at least in French, consonants already have a privileged role in lexical processing by 11 months of age, as claimed by Nespor, Peña, and Mehler (2003). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Episodic memory involves binding components of an event (who, what, when, and where) into a relational representation. The ability to encode information about the relative locations of objects (i.e., spatial relational memory) is a key component of episodic memory. Here we used eye tracking to test whether infants and toddlers learn about the spatial relations among objects. In Experiment 1, 9-, 18-, and 27-month olds were familiarized with an array of three objects. Following familiarization, they saw test arrays in which two of the objects had been replaced with novel ones (object switch condition) and arrays in which two of the objects had switched positions (location switch condition). Both 18- and 27-month olds looked significantly longer than would be predicted by chance at the objects that had switched spatial locations; however, 9-month olds did not. In Experiment 2, we showed that, given sufficient familiarization time, 9-month olds were also capable of detecting disruptions to the spatial relations among an array of objects. These results have important implications for our understanding of spatial relational memory development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To investigate the developmental emergence of the perception of the multisensory coherence of native and non-native audiovisual fluent speech, we tested 4-, 8- to 10-, and 12- to 14-month-old English-learning infants. Infants first viewed two identical female faces articulating two different monologues in silence and then in the presence of an audible monologue that matched the visible articulations of one of the faces. Neither the 4-month-old nor 8- to 10-month-old infants exhibited audiovisual matching in that they did not look longer at the matching monologue. In contrast, the 12- to 14-month-old infants exhibited matching and, consistent with the emergence of perceptual expertise for the native language, perceived the multisensory coherence of native-language monologues earlier in the test trials than that of non-native language monologues. Moreover, the matching of native audible and visible speech streams observed in the 12- to 14-month-olds did not depend on audiovisual synchrony, whereas the matching of non-native audible and visible speech streams did depend on synchrony. Overall, the current findings indicate that the perception of the multisensory coherence of fluent audiovisual speech emerges late in infancy, that audiovisual synchrony cues are more important in the perception of the multisensory coherence of non-native speech than that of native audiovisual speech, and that the emergence of this skill most likely is affected by perceptual narrowing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to recent theoretical proposals, one function of infant goal attribution is to support early social learning of artifact functions from instrumental actions, and one function of infant sensitivity to communication is to support early acquisition of generic knowledge about enduring, kind-relevant properties of the referents. The current study tested two hypotheses, derived from these proposals, about the conditions that facilitate the acquisition of enduring functions for novel tools during human infancy. Using a violation-of-expectation paradigm, we show that 13.5-month-old infants encode arbitrary end states of action sequences in relation to the novel tools employed to bring them about. These mappings are not formed if the same end states of action sequences cannot be interpreted as action goals. Moreover, the tool–goal mappings acquired from infant-directed communicative demonstrations are more resilient to counterevidence than those acquired from non-infant-directed presentations and, thus, show similarities to generic representations rather than episodic ones. These findings suggest that the acquisition of tool functions during infancy is guided by both teleological action interpretation mechanisms and the expectation that communicative demonstrations reveal enduring dispositional properties of tools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From a very young age, infants perceive others’ actions as goal directed. Yet, the processes underlying this competence are still debated. In this study, we investigated whether (a) 4- and 6-month-old infants and adults discriminate the biomechanical properties of the human hand within an action context, (b) the manipulation of the biomechanics of hand movements has an impact on the ability to anticipate the goal of an action, and (c) the emergence of motor experience with grasping is related to infants’ ability to discriminate the biomechanics of hand movements and to anticipate the action goal. The 6-month-olds discriminated between biomechanically possible and impossible grasps, and in some (but not all) instances they made more anticipatory gaze shifts toward the goal of the possible action. Both the 4- and 6-month-olds’ processing of biomechanical properties of the hand were significantly related to their ability to anticipate the goal of a grasping action. Importantly, those 4-month-olds with higher precision grasping skills manifested faster anticipatory gazes toward the goal of the action. These findings suggest that multiple sources of information from an action scene are interdependent and that both perceptual information and motor experience with an action are relevant for on-line prediction of the final goal of the action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• 14-Month-old walkers outperform crawlers on visual search. • In toddlerhood late walkers perform worse on a selective attention task. • Thus, walking experience relates to selective attention in the first years of life. • This relation is mainly seen relatively close to the age of walking onset. Previous studies have shown that the way in which infants perceive and explore the world changes as they transition from crawling to walking. Infant walking onset generally precedes advances in cognitive development such as accelerated language growth. However, the underlying mechanism explaining this association between walking experience and cognition is largely unknown. Selective attention is a key factor underlying learning across multiple domains. We propose that the altered visual input that infants obtain as they transition to walking relates to selective attention development and that advances in selective attention may potentially explain previously reported advances in other cognitive domains. As a first step in testing this hypothesis, we investigated how walking experience relates to selective attention. In Study 1, performance of 14-month-old crawlers, novice walkers, and expert walkers was compared on a visual search eye-tracking task (N = 47), including feature and conjunction (effortful) items. Walkers outperformed crawlers on the task in general, and effortful search was enhanced in expert walkers as compared with novice walkers, after controlling for crawling onset and general developmental differences occurring before walking onset. In Study 2, earlier walking onset was related to better visual search performance in 2-year-olds (N = 913). The association appeared to be due to the difference between the 10% latest walkers and the early/average walkers. Taken together, the results of these studies show that walking experience relates to advances in selective attention. This association shows a specific timing in development; it is mainly seen relatively close to the age of walking onset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Nine-month-old infants showed some convergence in visual and manual preferences for the equal distributor. • These results were not due perceptual cues and affiliative biases. • These findings suggest that infants consider agents' intentions when they evaluate distributive actions. Recent research revealed that infants attend to agents' intentions when they evaluate helping actions. The current study investigated whether infants also consider agents' intentions when they evaluate distributive actions. In Experiment 1, 9-month-old infants were first shown two failed attempts to perform a distribution. In the "failed equal distribution," the distributor first tried to reach one of the recipients to deliver an apple, failed, and then attempted to reach the other possible recipient to deliver a different apple and also failed. In the "failed unequal distribution," a different distributor always tried unsuccessfully to reach the same beneficiary. Then, in the test phase, infants were presented with the two distributors side by side, and infants' spontaneous preferential looking and reaching actions were recorded. We found a reliable preference for the equal distributor in both the visual and manual responses. Experiments 2 and 3 helped to rule out alternative explanations based on perceptual cues and affiliative biases. Overall, these findings suggest that infants' ability to evaluate distributive actions relies not only on the outcomes but also on the distributors' intentions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current research investigated how infants apply prior knowledge of environmental regularities to support new learning. The experiments tested whether infants could exploit experience with native language (English) phonotactic patterns to facilitate associating sounds with meanings during word learning. Infants (14-month-olds) heard fluent speech that contained cues for detecting target words; the target words were embedded in sequences that occur across word boundaries. A separate group heard the target words embedded without word boundary cues. Infants then participated in an object label learning task. With the opportunity to use native language patterns to segment the target words, infants subsequently learned the labels. Without this experience, infants failed. Novice word learners can take advantage of early learning about sounds to scaffold lexical development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] Parents and infants participated in the Still-Face Paradigm at 3, 5, and 7months. [•] Maternal and paternal sensitivity were related to infant responses during the SFP. [•] Sensitivity trajectories during the SFP predicted infant attachment at one year. [•] Infant affective and behavioral response trajectories predicted infant attachment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] 12-month-olds acquire generic cultural knowledge in communicative learning contexts. [•] Infants are sensitive to functionally relevant information in communicative learning contexts. [•] Infants’ interpretation of emotion displays is dependent on communicative signals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] Visual object recognition changes markedly as toddlers manually act on objects. [•] Aligning objects by their most elongated axis is on critically developing skill. [•] Aligning objects by their major axis improves markedly between 18- and 24 months. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Infants possess basic capabilities to assess various quantitative properties such as number, size, and time. Preverbal discriminations are approximate, however, and are similarly limited across these dimensions. Here, we present the first evidence that multiple sources of quantitative unisensory information about dynamic stimuli—namely, simultaneous visual cues to changes in both number and surface area—may accelerate 6-month-olds’ quantitative competence. Using a habituation–dishabituation paradigm, results from Experiment 1 demonstrate that, when provided with such visual cues to multiple quantitative properties that occur in the same direction, infants make more precise discriminations than has been shown when they receive information about either cue alone. Moreover, Experiment 2 demonstrates that infants’ discrimination also benefits from simultaneous visual cues to quantitative changes that occur in opposite directions. Finally, Experiment 3 demonstrates that these findings are not driven by infants’ ability to discriminate a 2:3 ratio change in surface area of a dynamic stimulus alone. Thus, we hypothesize that enhanced quantitative discrimination occurs because simultaneous visual quantitative changes may be more salient than single-source information, which could better recruit attention and result in more precise learning and remembering. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Highlights: [•] Eighteen-month-olds demonstrate false-belief understanding in an unexpected-contents task. [•] They decide how best to help others by taking into account others’ goals and beliefs. [•] Thus infants use their theory of mind flexibly in a variety of tasks. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Highlights: [•] We showed 3-, 6-, and 9-month-olds engaging animated and live-action videos of social stimuli. [•] Looking at faces was strongly related to performance in a visual search task. [•] Infants’ attentional abilities may be important in facilitating social attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Infant race preferences were investigated in a multi-racial society. • Infants were tested at 3-, 6- and 9 months. • Effects of variation in caregiver race were investigated. • Infants demonstrated consistent other-race preferences. • Other-race caregiving was associated with a more pronounced other-race preference at 9 months. Over their first year of life, infants express visual preferences for own- versus other-race faces. This developmental transition has primarily been investigated in monoracial societies where infants have limited personal or societal contact with other races. We investigated whether previously reported visual preferences for race generalize to a multiracial society (i.e., Singapore). In addition, we investigated effects of caregiver race on visual preferences for race. In Experiment 1, race preferences were measured at 3, 6, and 9 months of age for own-race (Chinese) versus other-race (Indian) faces in infants with no regular interaction with Indian-race individuals. Singaporean infants displayed a significant visual preference for Indian-race faces at each age group. Furthermore, infants raised with other-race caregivers demonstrated an age-related increase in other-race visual preferences. The visual preferences of infants for other-race faces were predicted by the extent of other-race contact. In Experiment 2, we confirmed that an other-race visual preference was not exclusive to Indian faces in a sample of 6-month-old Singaporean Chinese infants who demonstrated a similar other-race visual preference for Caucasian faces over Chinese faces. Findings are discussed in terms of the influence of other-race contact on visual preferences for race in infants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Functional and structural lateralisation of the brain is widespread among vertebrates. • The early development of the phenomenon called pseudoneglect is unknown. • By tracking 4- to 5-month-old infants' eye gazes, this study revealed that pseudoneglect is present in the first months of life. • Both biological and cultural factors may contribute to the development and consolidation of visuo-spatial biases. Adults present a large number of asymmetries in visuospatial behavior that are known to be supported by functional brain lateralization. Although there is evidence of lateralization for motor behavior and language processing in infancy, no study has explored visuospatial attention biases in the early stages of development. In this study, we tested for the presence of a leftward visuospatial bias (i.e., pseudoneglect) in 4- and 5-month-old infants using an adapted version of the line bisection task. Infants were trained to identify the center of a horizontal line (Experiment 1) while their eye gazes were monitored using a remote eye-tracking procedure to measure their potential gazing error. Infants exhibited a robust pseudoneglect, gazing leftward with respect to the veridical midpoint of the horizontal line. To investigate whether infants' pseudoneglect generalizes to any given object or is dependent on the horizontal dimension, in Experiment 2 we assessed infants' gaze deployment in vertically oriented lines. No leftward bias was found, suggesting that early visuospatial attention biases in infancy are constrained by the orientation of the visual plane in which the information is organized. The interplay between biological and cultural factors that might contribute to the early establishment of the observed leftward bias in the allocation of visuospatial attention is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] Configural spacing information contributes to face processing expertise in adults. [•] 5- and 9-month-olds discriminated spacing changes in human male and monkey faces. [•] However, infants failed to discriminate matched changes in house stimuli. [•] Thus, infants exhibited specialization on primate face stimuli. [•] Perceptual narrowing in face processing was not evident in this study. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Infants need to analyze human behavior in terms of goal-directed actions in order to form expectations about agents’ rationality. There is converging evidence for goal encoding during the first year of life from looking time as well as social learning paradigms using imitation procedures. However, conceptual interpretations of these abilities are challenged by low-level motor resonance accounts that propose task-specific lower level sensorimotor associations underlying looking time tasks rather than abstract conceptual knowledge. To test the differential predictions derived from the two accounts, we investigated within-child consistency of performance on different, but conceptually related, tasks requiring goal encoding. This study presented seven-month-old infants with a looking time task and an imitation task, both testing their ability to encode an action goal based on a reaching action, as well as a working memory task to control for the influence of general cognitive capacity. Results showed inter task convergence to be independent of working memory: infants who spent more time looking at goal change events in the looking time task were more likely to selectively reproduce the goal in the imitation task when the model had performed an intentional grasping action rather than a back-of-hand object contact. These findings support the view that low-level motor resonance mechanisms are not sufficient to explain the capacities of action understanding in infants. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: We examined infants’ ability to generalize effective actions in an imitation task. In Experiment 1, 15-month-olds imitated effective and ineffective actions on two similarly designed toys. They were then shown a third toy of the same design with both actions available. Children reliably touched and manipulated the effective action handle first and more persistently. In Experiment 2, however, 15-month-olds did not generalize the efficacy of the action when the test toy was different from the two demonstration toys. Experiment 3 replicated the findings of Experiment 2 but also showed that infants generalized efficacy when the demonstration toys differed from one another as well as from the test toy. Our findings are consistent with a computational model that uses certain rational pedagogical assumptions. Overall, the results suggest that 15-month-olds are sensitive to the sampling information they observe and use this information to guide whether to generalize efficacy information they learn from imitation. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]