Social Cognitive Development in Infancy Flashcards
Social-cognitive development is broadly the development of infants’ ability to
Social-cognitive development is broadly the development of infants’ ability to understand that other people have unobservable entities called minds.
Infants need to understand that the actions of other agents will depend on the knowledge and beliefs held in their minds. They also need to understand that this knowledge and these beliefs may differ from the knowledge and beliefs that the infant holds in their own mind. Social-cognitive understanding is cognitively sophisticated and has a protracted developmental timecourse. Nevertheless, remarkable development occurs during the first year of life. We will consider some of the mechanisms underpinning infant social-cognitive development in this lecture.
One index of social cognition is imitation.
Social cognition index 1
One index of social cognition is imitation. In copying the actions of others, a child needs to detect a correspondence between themselves and another.
It has been argued by Meltzoff, a prominent theorist in this field, that via imitation the infant comes to recognise the person being imitated as “just like me”. Imitation shows that, at some primitive level, infants are mapping the actions of other people onto the actions of their own bodies. They are also connecting the visible bodily actions of others with their own internal states. Meltzoff argues that this cross-modal knowledge of what it feels like to do the act that was seen then provides a privileged access to people as special kinds of entities.
He suggests that the infant experiences her own internal desires (e.g., she wants her bottle) and experiences the actions (concomitant bodily movements) required to fulfil these desires or goals (she reaches for her bottle). This helps the infant to make sense of the object-directed movements of others. When another person is seen reaching for an object, the action can be imbued with goal-directedness, because of the infant’s own experience with similar acts. If imitation can be seen from birth, this would imply that humans are born with some innate knowledge of self and other.
Facial expression imitation
A strong test of this would be to observe whether neonates can imitate the facial expressions of an adult. Because neonates have yet to experience the visual experience of their own faces, this excludes the possibility that the imitation is just matching the visual input of a body part moving with visual feedback of moving their own matching body part.
Indeed, Meltzoff has claimed that facial imitation is on-line from birth (e.g., Meltzoff & Moore, 1983) and theorised that an innate active intermodal matching (AIM) mechanism serves to create a correspondence between visual input of the other and matching proprioceptive information produced during the baby’s matching actions and predicted that the Aim allows any action to be imitated by neonates. However, as ever there are alternative explanations.
One possibility is that copying facial expressions result from an evolved mechanism that confers a survival advantage
One possibility is that copying facial expressions result from an evolved mechanism that confers a survival advantage – an innate releasing mechanism.
For example, ethological studies have observed that certain specific stimuli produce automatic responses (fixed action patterns) in the young of certain animal species, such as gull chicks pecking at the beaks of their mothers which produces regurgitated food.
Reliable “imitation” in neonatal humans is seen only for tongue protrusion (Anisfeld, 1991) suggesting that this specific action in the adult automatically elicits a fixed action pattern which happens to match the adult’s facial gesture.
However, this propensity for tongue protrusion appears limited to the immediate post-natal period: replication of tongue protrusion is substantially lower in studies involving babies over one month old compared to studies on neonates (Nagy et al, 2014).
Furthermore, imitative gestures appear to undergo prolonged development over the first 20 months of life, and reliable tongue protrusion was not seen until 18 months in Jones’ (2007) longitudinal study of imitation in babies from 6 months onwards, suggesting that the gesture seen at 18 months serves a very different function to the gesture seen at birth.
However, a more recent study (Nagy et al 2014) suggests that neonates will copy adults finger movements but only after 3 modelling trials with inaccurate responses and then with accurate responses after 5 modelling trials. This suggests an entirely different imitation mechanism – a (non-innate) learning process which can be observed in the first days of life.
Face tracking
Innate then non-innate
A similar pattern of development is seen in neonatal face tracking (see Lecture 1). Neonates will track a face like stimulus over a scrambled face but only in the first days of life. By one month, they show no such preferences. Then, at 10 weeks, a preference re-emerges but at 19 weeks, babies show little interest in any of the artificial drawing stimuli. By this age however, they show good discrimination among the faces of people around them that they are familiar with. Similarly to the imitation of facial gestures, transitory face tracking in the appears to be supported by a different mechanism to that which supports real-life encoding of faces.
infant gaze monitoring behaviour
Social cognition index 2
Another foundational mechanism for understanding psychological causation is infant gaze monitoring behaviour.
The information from another person’s eyes is very important for social cognition. For most of us, it is second nature to monitor another person’s gaze. We follow gaze in order to work out what is capturing the attention of another agent, and we look into their eyes to try and infer their emotions, their intentions and their likely future actions.
Contingency learning appears to be a crucial aspect of the development of gaze monitoring and contingency detection can be observed from birth. One reason that infants may develop psychological understanding relatively early in life is that their caretakers treat them as social partners. When caring for infants, adults usually make their behaviour contingent upon, rather than ignoring of, infant attempts to communicate.
In fact, caretakers may treat their infants as acting communicatively even before infants are intentionally acting in this way. Striano, Henning and Stahl (2005) explored infants’ sensitivity to social contingencies, by studying babies aged 1 and 3 months during face-to-face interactions with their mothers. By 3 months, the infants were behaving differently in response to the different contingencies.
Contigency Learning
Contingency learning appears to be a crucial aspect of the development of gaze monitoring and contingency detection can be observed from birth. One reason that infants may develop psychological understanding relatively early in life is that their caretakers treat them as social partners. When caring for infants, adults usually make their behaviour contingent upon, rather than ignoring of, infant attempts to communicate. In fact, caretakers may treat their infants as acting communicatively even before infants are intentionally acting in this way. Striano, Henning and Stahl (2005) explored infants’ sensitivity to social contingencies, by studying babies aged 1 and 3 months during face-to-face interactions with their mothers. By 3 months, the infants were behaving differently in response to the different contingencies.
Another way of using gaze to understand the internal mental states of others is via social referencing.
Another way of using gaze to understand the internal mental states of others is via social referencing.
This refers to appraising a current situation on the basis of the emotional expressions and behaviours of others and then regulating your own behaviour accordingly. The infant modulates his or her reaction to an object or event by reference to information gained from the actions of another. One possibility is that infants modulate their behaviour because of a mentalistic interpretation of the reaction of another. For example, they may have an interpretation like “she is reacting like that because she is scared, this is a potentially dangerous toy”. A second possibility is that they modulate their behaviour simply because the emotional display acts as a signal, telling them what to do (for example, “that expression means that I should stop”). Clearly, only the former possibility implies understanding of the internal mental states of another agent.
The classic study on social referencing used an apparatus called the visual cliff (Gibson & Walk, 1960).
The classic study on social referencing used an apparatus called the visual cliff (Gibson & Walk, 1960). Babies of crawling age (around 9 months) would not crawl over the edge of the “cliff”, even though the solid transparent surface enabled them to do so. Later work showed that crawling behaviour on the visual cliff could be modulated by emotional expressions made by the mother. One study found that, when the mother made a fearful face, no infants crossed the cliff. When the mother made a happy face, the majority of infants crossed the drop (Source et al, 1985). However, can that effect be interpreted as evidence of an intentional understanding of the mother’s expressions? Vaish & Striano (2004) found that babies used faces with vocal cues more than facial cues alone, allowing a possible interpretation that conditioning with reliable cues underpins social referencing.
A second form of evidence is what we can learn from the infant’s own actions.
Considering infant reactions to the actions of other agents provides one form of evidence regarding the mechanisms underpinning social-cognitive development. A second form of evidence is what we can learn from the infant’s own actions. For example, pointing is an infant behaviour that is very important.
There are two kinds of pointing
There are two kinds of pointing: “protodeclarative” pointing and “protoimperative” pointing. When a point has a protoimperative function, it is used to obtain an object. The infant points in order to communicate “I want that” or “Get me that”. Protoimperative pointing does not necessitate an understanding of the mental states of others. The infant could simply be pointing because the usual outcome is getting the desired object (this would be stimulus-response or instrumental learning). When a point has a protodeclarative function, the point is used to “remark on” the world to another person. This is thought to involve a higher, more mentalistic level of communication: the infant appears to want to influence the mental state of another person or to share a mental state with another person. The infant is communicating something along the lines of “Look over there!” In protodeclarative pointing, the infant’s goal is shared or joint attention, an important indicator of early mindreading skills.
There has been some debate over whether protodeclarative points are intentionally communicative acts.
There has been some debate over whether protodeclarative points are intentionally communicative acts. The pointing infant usually also alternates her gaze between the adult’s face and the object being pointed at, suggesting a desire to affect the adult’s behaviour. Liszkowski et al. (2004) provided experimental evidence that this was the case. They compared what happened when adults either rewarded infants’ protodeclarative pointing with shared attention and interest, or did not. In their study, 75 12-month-old babies interacted with an adult experimenter in one of 4 conditions. Liszkowski et al. expected more pointing and looking in the conditions when the experimenter was refusing to share her attention with the infant, and this was essentially what they found. However, this result is ambiguous – it could show that infant pointing behaviour has communicative intent but alternatively their behaviour may simply result from learned behaviours (looking and pointing) that have in the past been rewarded by mother’s attention towards them.
Operations of the perceptual system also primed to assume intentionality from spatio-temporal dynamics in the absence of contradictory evidence.
Although it is difficult to adjudicate between a mentalistic and a behavioural interpretation of pointing behaviours, there is nonetheless evidence suggesting that operations of the perceptual system also primed to assume intentionality from spatio-temporal dynamics in the absence of contradictory evidence.
This was first noticed by Michotte (1963), who suggested that simple motion cues may provide the foundation for physical causal understanding and for social cognition. Adults who are shown simple displays of moving geometric shapes will describe the displays as animate (“it’s trying to get over there”). Infants also seem to assume animacy from certain kinds of motion.
Experiments by Gergely and his colleagues have shown that the attribution of agency on the basis of perceptual information can be quite sophisticated. They pointed out that the prediction and explanation of the behaviour of agents requires the attribution of intentional states such as beliefs, goals, and desires as the mental causes of actions. They termed this the “intentional stance”. Gergely, Nadasdy, Csibra, and Biro (1995) showed that 12-month-old infants appeared to adopt an intentional stance when analysing a simple spatial set-up involving circles and rectangles. Their experiment was based on the movements of the circles on a computer screen. When the movements could be interpreted rationally, the infants appeared to apply an “intentional stance” to these movements. In other words, the infants were attributing a mental cause for the apparently goal-directed behaviour that they observed.
Finally, we consider other demonstrations that infants attribute mental causes for the goal-directed behaviour that they observe in other agents.
Finally, we consider other demonstrations that infants attribute mental causes for the goal-directed behaviour that they observe in other agents. Work from Tomasello and his colleagues demonstrates that infants take context into account when inferring the reason for goal-directed behaviour. For example, they show differential imitation of the same action because of changes in context (whether a mouse is hopping home to his house or not). Infants also imitate the acts of others differentially depending on whether they perceive these acts to be intentional or accidental. They appear to interpret an adult’s behaviour as intentional, and screen out the accidental and unintended actions. Note that the ability to recognise intentional actions provides a powerful boost to the infant’s capacity for imitative learning. An infant who selectively imitates only the intentional acts of others will acquire many significant cultural skills. Finally, infants differentiate between adults who are unwilling to carry out an act desired by the infant versus unable to carry out this act (Behne et al., 2005). Again, this suggests a capacity for an understanding of psychological causation.
