Infants’ understanding of everyday social interactions: A dual process account (original) (raw)
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13-Month-Olds’ Understanding of Social Interactions
Psychological Science, 2015
In the social world, people constantly gather information to evaluate others (e.g., whether or not someone is friendly), which influences how one interacts with another (e.g., approaches or avoids someone). The information includes understanding other people's mental states (i.e., possessing a theory of mind), such as their intentions and beliefs, as well as assessing others' personality traits on the basis of observations of behavior. Unfortunately, the information on which social evaluations are based is not always accurate. When using limited information, one may hold false beliefs about others and form erroneous evaluations, which in turn affect social interactions. For example, most children are unlikely to play with a naughty child who hits others or takes others' toys (Parker & Asher, 1987). When some children have not seen this child's transgression, however, and instead falsely believe that he or she is not mean, they may play with him or her, until they personally see the transgression happen and then change how they interact with the naughty child (e.g., Asher & McDonald, 2009; Hymel, Vaillancourt, McDougall, & Renshaw, 2002). To comprehend this situation, both a theory of mind and social-evaluation skills are necessary. Recent research shows that these social-cognitive capacities emerge early in infancy. For the present study, we thus designed a situation similar to that described above to examine how infants make sense of social interactions. Adults use a coherent construct of mental states, including intentions, perceptions, beliefs, and false beliefs, to understand each other. False-belief understanding is particularly crucial because it elucidates that other people's minds are representations of the world, rather than direct copies, and hence can be false (Wellman, Cross, & Watson, 2001). Many researchers have shown that even infants ascribe to agents (i.e., entities that can act and react to the environment) intentions, perceptions, and beliefs as underlying reasons for their behavior (the mentalistic account; for a review, see Luo & Baillargeon, 2010). Recent data also suggest that infants may understand other people's false beliefs, although this interpretation is still controversial (for reviews, see
Perceiving the Real World: Infants' Detection of and Memory for Social Information
Infancy, 2001
Research on infants' perception and memory for social information are discussed with respect to the concept of ecological validity. We argue that the use of dynamic, multimodal displays in familiar contexts is critical to understanding infants' developing perception. We also discuss the importance of generalizing appropriately from experimental to real-world contexts and of using converging methods in the investigation of infants' capabilities. From birth, an infant is plunged into a world of other human beings in which conversation, gestures, and faces are omnipresent during the infant's waking hours. Moreover, these harbingers of social information are dynamic, multimodal, and reciprocal. It is no wonder that infants' early perceptual preferences include the human face, the human voice, animate motion, and events and interactions with these important social beings. Therefore, in the study of perceptual development we argue that it is paramount to include investigations of infants' recognition and responses to information provided by other human beings and to include exemplars of that information in the most potent (ecologically valid) form. After a discussion of what is meant by the term ecological tdidity in this context, we summarize re-Requests for reprints should be sent t o Arlene S. Walker-Andrews. Department of Psychology, 53 Avenue E. Rutgers University. Piscataway. NJ 08854-XWO.
IARIA, ComputationWorld 2020 : Phase 1 - Preliminary Proceedings, 2020
The question of the acquisition of the first social phenomena by newborns is a crucial issue both in understanding the mental development and the ontogenesis of social interaction. The review attempts to investigate other researches that observe social behavior in studies with no communication between subjects. This current analysis reviews several studies on social phenomena-categorization of words, preference of faces and even race-in newborns and 3-to 4-months-old infants and complements their findings. The review states that newborns and young infants are not able to independently classify phenomena from social reality and perceptually interact with adults effectively enough to understand the meanings of social phenomena on their own. The review concludes that the social behavior of infants is driven by adult social learning through non-perceptual social interaction between them. This thesis is supported by the recent review on social behavior of infants and the experiments on language acquisition of adults, where it is also shown the increase of group performance provided by such unconscious mental collaboration. The long-term study of non-perceptual social interaction could form the basis of the advanced curriculum that can efficiently introduce new knowledge into the long-term memory domain of students to facilitate and accelerate their learning.
The Influence of the Social Context on Infants' Reactions to New People
1991
This study examined infants' reactions to new people by manipulating the social context in which infants became acquainted with new people. Infants (N=48) met someone new in the presence of another unfamiliar adult and their mothers. The new acquaintance either: (1) chatted and worked on a puzzle with the mother; (2) remained silent and worked on a puzzle with the unfamiliar adult; or (3) remained silent and worked on the puzzle alone. Mothers then left the infants alone with the new acquaintance. Infants who saw their mothers socialize with the new person interacted with that person more than did infants whose mothers did not socialize with the person. Infants in the social conditions appeared more comfortable than did infants in the silent condition. Infants in the silent condition remained closer to their mothers, played less with toys, and fussed more after their mothers left than did infants in the social conditions. A list of 14 references is included. (BC)
Early Infant Social Interaction with Parents and Strangers
Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry, 1981
This paper extends the observations of early mother-infant face-to-face interaction to situations in which infants 1 to 6 months of age interact with fathers and strangers. Videotaped records of these laboratory interactions were scored second by second. We saw differences in the behavior of both infants and adults in these interactions. Even infants less than 2 months of age behaved distinctively with the different adults in these settings. Infants showed more positive affective displays with both parents than with strangers. The implications of these findings for the theoretical understanding of the infant's affective development as well as for public health concerns are discussed.