Search

Previous research has found that within the first year of life infants possess rich knowledge about social structures (i.e., that some individuals are dominant over other individuals) as well as expectations about resource distributions (i.e., that resources are typically distributed equally to recipients). We investigated whether infants' expectations about resource distribution can be modulated by information about the dominance structure between the recipients. We first replicated the finding that infants attribute a stable dominance hierarchy to a pair of individuals when their goals conflicted and one individual yielded to the other (Expt. 1), and that this sensitivity is not driven by lower-level perceptual factors (Expt. 2). In Experiments 3-5, we tested our main hypothesis that infants' attention to equal and unequal distributions varies as a function of prior social dominance information. We first replicated and extended prior work by establishing that infants looked significantly longer to unequal than equal resource distributions when no prior information about dominance was provided about recipients (Expt. 3). Critically, following social dominance information, infants looked significantly longer to an equal distribution of resources than a distribution that favored the dominant individual (Expt. 4), and looked significantly longer when the submissive individual received more resources compared to when the dominant individual received more resources (Expts. 4 and 5). Together, these findings suggest that infants expect resources to align with social dominance structures., (Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Recent evidence suggests adults and infants selectively attend to features of action, such as how a hand contacts an object. The current research investigated whether this bias stems from infants' processing of the functional consequences of grasps: understanding that different grasps afford different future actions. A habituation paradigm assessed 10-month-old infants' (N = 62) understanding of the functional consequences of precision and whole-hand grasps in others' actions, and infants' own precision grasping abilities were also assessed. The results indicate infants understood the functional consequences of another's grasp only if they could perform precision grasps themselves. These results highlight a previously unknown aspect of early action understanding, and deepen our understanding of the relation between motor experience and cognition., (© 2012 The Authors. Child Development © 2012 Society for Research in Child Development, Inc.)

Recent evidence suggests that adults selectively attend to features of action, such as how a hand contacts an object, and less to configural properties of action, such as spatial trajectory, when observing human actions. The current research investigated whether this bias develops in infancy. We utilized a habituation paradigm to assess 4-month-old and 10-month-old infants' discrimination of action based on featural, configural, and temporal sources of action information. Younger infants were able to discriminate changes to all three sources of information, but older infants were only able to reliably discriminate changes to featural information. These results highlight a previously unknown aspect of early action processing, and suggest that action perception may undergo a developmental process akin to perceptual narrowing., (© 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.)

In this article, we bring together recent findings from developmental science and cognitive neuroscience to argue that perception-action coupling constitutes the fundamental mechanism of motor cognition. A variety of empirical evidence suggests that observed and executed actions are coded in a common cognitive and neural framework, enabling individuals to construct shared representations of self and other actions. We review work to suggest that such shared representations support action anticipation, organization, and imitation. These processes, along with additional computational mechanisms for determining a sense of agency and behavioral regulation, form the fabric of socialinteraction. In addition, humans possess the capacity to move beyond these basic aspects of action analysis to interpret behavior at a deeper level, an ability that may be outside the scope of the mirror system. Understanding the nature of shared representations from the vantage point of developmental and cognitive science and neuroscience has the potential to inform a range of motor and social processes. This perspective also elucidates intriguing new directions and research questions and generates specific hypotheses regarding the impact of early disorders (e.g., developmental movement disorders) on subsequent action processing.