Infants use attention but not emotions to predict others’ actions

doi:10.1016/j.infbeh.2009.11.003

Infant Behavior and Development

Volume 33, Issue 1, February 2010, Pages 79-87

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infbeh.2009.11.003 Get rights and content

Abstract

Phillips et al. (2002) suggest that by 12–14 months, infants can use a person's emotional and attentional cues to predict that person's actions. However, this work was conducted using only positive emotions, which is problematic because attention and positive emotions lead to the same prediction about a person's actions, thus leaving unclear whether infants made predictions based upon attention and emotion or attention alone. To get around this problem, we used both positive and negative emotions in a looking-time paradigm to investigate whether 14-month-old infants can use emotional cues to predict a person's actions. The findings suggest that infants used attentional but not emotional cues as predictors. We argue that while 14-month-olds can use another person's emotion cues to modify their own behavior (as in social referencing situations), they do not yet use them robustly to predict the other's behavior.

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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Infants use attention but not emotions to predict others’ actions

Abstract

Section snippets

Participants

Familiarization

Discussion

Acknowledgements

Cognition

Cognition

Cognition

Beyond bipolar conceptualizations and measures: The case of attitudes and evaluative space

Personality and Social Psychology Review

Infant understanding of containment: An affordance perceived or a relationship conceived?

Developmental Psychology

Unmasking the face: A guide to recognizing emotions from facial clues

On pedagogy

Developmental Science

The retention effects of an adult's emotional displays on infant behavior

Child Development

The effects of maternal positive, neutral, and negative affective communication on infant responses to new toys

Child Development

Evidence for referential understanding in the emotions domain at twelve and eighteen months

Child Development

Infants’ responses to facial and vocal emotional signals in a social referencing paradigm

Child Development