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The goal of this project is to examine individual differences in infants’ early social evaluations across diverse cultural contexts. Specifically, this project aims to test the relation between infants’ preferences for prosocial characters (“helpers”) over antisocial characters (“hinderers”) and (1) caregiver prosocial characteristics, beliefs, expectations, and socialization practices; (2) the infants’ cultural context; (3) infants’ everyday prosocial behaviors. We take a multi-method approach, combining experimental, observational, and survey-based measures in a large sample of infants from labs across the world. This study is a spin-off of the ManyBabies4 (MB4) project, a large-scale, multi-laboratory, standardized investigation of infants’ social evaluations. The goal of MB4 is to test the replicability, and obtain a more precise understanding of the effect size, of the finding that infants prefer a character (i.e., a triangle with googly eyes) who helps, over a character who hinders, another character in reaching their goal (i.e., climbing to the top of a mountain, Hamlin et al., 2007). For a complete background and full methodological details of MB4, see the project’s pre-print (https://psyarxiv.com/qhxkm). Infants’ preferences in this hill paradigm appear to reflect an early-emerging ability to socially evaluate others based on their actions toward third party agents (Hamlin et al., 2007). However, not all infants display a preference for prosocial characters. A meta-analysis reported an estimated average of 68% of infants between 4 and 32 months select prosocial over antisocial characters in social evaluation tasks, meaning that 32% of infants select antisocial characters (Margoni & Surian, 2018). Individual differences in infants’ social evaluations have been documented in a variety of behavioral tasks including the hill paradigm, the box-opening/closing paradigm (Hamlin & Wynn, 2011; Hamlin et al., 2011), and the ball-giving/taking paradigm (Hamlin & Wynn, 2011; Tan et al., 2018), in addition to brain activity studies while perceiving others’ prosocial/friendly or antisocial/threatening behaviors (Cowell & Decety, 2015; Krol & Grossman, 2020). Here, we aim to examine factors that relate to individual differences in social preferences in the hill paradigm by using a large sample of infants from diverse cultural contexts. The main objective is to explore the role that two key experience-related factors may play in infants' social preferences: caregivers and culture. A subsidiary goal of this project is to explore whether infants' social preferences relate to their everyday prosocial behaviors. The MB4 project provides a unique opportunity to test questions about individual differences because it aims to recruit a large number of infants from a diverse group of labs (see target lab participation and sample size, below). First, we will examine caregivers’ expectations, values, and practices surrounding prosociality in relation to their infants’ performance in the social evaluation task. To date, only a handful of studies have examined the parental correlates of social evaluation in infancy, with a focus on parental justice sensitivity and empathy (Cowell & Decety, 2015), parent-child attachment (Loheide-Niesmann et al., 2020), and parental moral evaluation talk (Shimizu et al., 2018). One shared limitation of these studies is that they tended to use small sample sizes (sample sizes were all less than 100), therefore lacking sufficient power to detect and identify robust correlates of individual differences early in infancy (Margoni & Shepperd, 2020; Oakes, 2017). Here, we will test the extent to which infants’ social evaluations are associated with three types of parental characteristics and behaviors: (1) parental justice sensitivity; (2) parental prosocial values, expectations, motivation, and beliefs, as measured by (a) parents’ other-oriented prosocial values; (b) the age at which parents expect infants to show prosocial behaviors; (c) parental interest and curiosity in their infants’ mental states; (3) parental socialization practices surrounding moral and social development, as measured by (a) parental moral language input; (b) parental mental state and emotional talk; (c) parental mind-mindedness, and (d) frequency of playing social games with their infants. We included multiple measures of parental factors to isolate which parental factors explain unique variation in infants’ preference for helper characters, above and beyond others. Including multiple measures will also allow us to develop tentative theoretical explanations with regard to the underlying mechanisms linking parental factors and infants’ preferences. For example, parental prosocial values, expected age of when infants can show prosocial behaviors, justice sensitivity, and moral language input might be related to infants’ sensitivity and responses to moral information in the hill paradigm. Parental interest and curiosity in infants’ mental states, mind-mindedness, mental state talk, and social-game playing might be related to infants’ processing of agents’ mental states, especially the intentions of the helper and the hinderer in the hill paradigm, which has been argued to underlie the development of early social preferences (Woo et al., 2022). In sum, by testing the extent to which each of these parent-related characteristics are associated with infants’ social evaluation performances, we hope to describe some of the sources of individual differences in infants’ social evaluations. A second aim of this project is to investigate the influence of culture on infants’ social evaluations. Findings on social development during infancy mainly come from data from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies, which warrants further investigation into early social development across more diverse backgrounds (Singh et al., 2021). Examining the role of culture, as well as caregiver socialization practices, on infants’ social evaluations is key because these cultural factors play an important role in the development of individual differences in social cognition and behavior, including self- and other-awareness, social learning, and prosocial behaviors (for a review, see Kaertner et al., 2020). To date, only one study has directly compared the role of parental factors in infants’ social evaluations across cultures (Shimizu et al., 2018). While European American mothers (on average) used more socially evaluative speech (e.g., “He opened the box for the elephant, that’s nice.”) than Japanese mothers, the frequency of mothers’ socially evaluative speech in both cultures was positively related to infants’ prosocial preferences across all ages (6-month-olds, 9-month-olds, 12-month-olds, and 15- to 18-month-olds) – suggesting that the broader cultural context plays an important role in shaping caregiver behavior and infants’ social preferences. Here, we sought to extend these findings by examining the relation between social evaluations and cultural context, as measured by both country of habitation as well as cultural values (i.e., collectivistic vs. individualistic). Previous research has shown that mothers from Western cultures (primarily individualistic cultures) talk more about mental states (e.g., emotions, knowledge states, beliefs, desires) and show higher tendency of mind-mindedness (i.e., viewing their child as an individual with a mind) than mothers from Eastern cultures (primarily collectivistic cultures; e.g., Doan & Wang, 2010; Hughes et al., 2018; Wang, 2001). Yet, it remains unknown whether parental mental state talk and mind-mindedness are associated with infants’ social evaluations, and whether distinct aspects of mind-mindedness (e.g., emotion talk vs. cognitive talk vs. desire talk) are differentially related to infants’ evaluations across cultures. Therefore, more evidence is needed to examine the role of parental mental state talk and mind-mindedness in infants’ social evaluations in different cultures. As a third and final goal, this study will examine the relation between infants’ performance in a social evaluation task (the hill paradigm) and their prosocial behaviors in daily life. The relation between moral evaluation and moral behaviors is a long debated topic. Some evidence suggests that children’s early moral evaluation or moral sense is related to their actual moral behaviors (e.g., Eisenberg & Shell, 1986; Malti et al., 2010; Schmidt & Sommerville, 2011). For example, 15-month-old infants’ sensitivity to others’ fair vs. unfair resource distribution was found to be related to their actual sharing behavior (Schmidt & Sommerville, 2011). Infants who looked longer at an unfair, compared to fair distribution, were more likely to share their own preferred toy with an unfamiliar adult. Other work suggests that evaluations and behavior are unrelated in a preschool sample (e.g., Tan et al., 2020). Here, we will assess whether infants who show a preference for the prosocial agent also show more prosocial behaviors in their daily lives. In sum, this project will examine infants’ social preferences for prosocial characters over antisocial characters in the hill paradigm in relation to (1) their caregivers’ moral-related characteristics, expectations, and everyday socialization activities, (2) the cultural context in which the infant is being raised, and (3) infants’ prosocial behaviors outside of the lab. Findings from this work will help us understand the roots of individual differences in infants’ social preferences, as well as culturally-shared and -unique patterns of development.

Sample template forms for demographic data collection.

This registration contains all the materials for the MB2 study, corresponding to the Registered Report which has received In Principle Acceptance (pending data collection) by Child Development. All study materials, de-identified data, and analysis code will be shared upon study completion.

A replication attempt of the findings of Grosse Wiesmann et al. (2017) on early false belief sensitivity

A project testing the influence of another's perspective on visual working memory

Richardson & Saxe (2019) describes a cross-sectional fMRI study of neurotypical children ages 3-7 years old. Children viewed Disney Pixar’s “Partly Cloudy”, twice, while undergoing fMRI. Richardson & Saxe report developmental change in a “narrative anticipation” effect in social brain regions (bilateral temporoparietal junction, precuneus, medial prefrontal cortex). In particular, these regions were recruited earlier in time during the second presentation of the movie with age. There was no such effect in a control network of brain regions (the “Pain Matrix”). Here, we use the exact same fMRI stimuli and analysis procedures to extend this research to neurotypical and autistic adults. Our primary hypotheses are (1) that the narrative anticipation effect will be present in social brain regions of neurotypical adults; and (2) that the narrative anticipation effect will be attenuated in social brain regions of autistic adults (cf., Pellicano and Burr, 2012).

This project contains materials, data and code for the study "Predicting Personality from Patterns of Behavior Collected with Smartphones", published in PNAS in 2020. This repository contains all the necessary data, syntax and other materials to reproduce the results from the variable-extraction point onwards. The Markdown script "paper.Rmd" knits the corresponding manuscript into a pdf file. Despite our strong commitment to open science practices, the raw log data cannot be made available openly, due to unsolved privacy implications of geolocation data and issues arising from the combination of other behavioral indicators (e.g., communication, app-usage, music consumption etc.). Below you also find a link to an interactive website that allows for the exploration of additional results for and provides resources to enable a better understanding of the used machine learning and data analytical tools.

In this multi-lab project, which is a part of the ManyBabies Project, we try to validate an open source, web-based, eye-tracking method for research on cognitive development in young children. More specifically, we evaluate whether this method, which is based on WebGazer.js (Papoutsaki et al., 2016) and jsPsych (de Leeuw, 2015), is comparable to lab-based eye-tracking. Therefore, we aim to replicate findings of an in-lab paradigm of the ManyBabies2 project, which revealed spontaneous goal-directed action anticipation in toddlers using commercial eye-tracking systems (Schuwerk, Kampis et al., 2021).