Infants use attention but not emotions to predict others’ actions
Section snippets
Participants
A total of 59 14-month-old infants were tested. The infants’ parents had been contacted by advertisements or mailings, and were offered $10 as travel reimbursement. Eleven of the 59 infants were excluded because they were fussy or distracted (7), there was an experimenter error (2) or an equipment failure (1), or because the infant was an outlier1
Familiarization
To assess infants’ looking to the happy versus disgust emotions during familiarization events, we conducted a repeated-measures ANOVA with duration of looks as the dependent measure, trial as a within-subjects factor (with 4 levels: familiarization trials 1, 2, 3, and 4), and condition as a between-subjects factor (with 2 levels: happy and disgust). This analysis revealed a main effect of condition, F(1,46) = 9.839, p = .003: infants’ looking times during disgust familiarization events (M = 23.39 s, SD
Discussion
Infants saw an actress looking either happily or disgustedly into a cup while ignoring a different cup. If infants can use emotions to reason and make predictions about others’ actions, they should show greater novelty preference when the actress behaves in a manner inconsistent with her emotional displays. That is, they should look longer not only when the actress has looked happily into one cup and then reaches into the other cup but also when the actress has looked disgustedly into one cup
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the parents and children who participated in the study. We also thank Özlem Ece Demir, Tobias Grossmann, and Kalina Michalska for helpful discussions, and the members of the Center for Infant Studies at the University of Chicago for their help in conducting the studies. This research was supported by NIH grant HD35707 to the second author.
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