Do infants possess innate knowledge structures? The con side

The central question of development is how new forms are made, how some structure, or behavior, or competence that was not there before, arises. This essay argues for a mechanistic answer to the question of the origins of new forms. And, in so doing, the essay argues that the so-called ‘innate versus learned’ dichotomy is logically flawed since ‘innate’ has no specifiable and mechanistic meaning. The essay considers first, a clear case of ‘innate’ structure: the origins of fingers and toes in embryology. The real-time mechanisms which create fingers and toes, however, are general, probabilistic, emergent and distributed across several levels of analyses. The idea of ‘innate’– even though certainly applicable – has no substantive content and yields no predictions about the nature of these mechanisms. The essay considers second, a clear case of a ‘learned’ structure: the origins of the shape bias in children’s early noun learning. Again, the developmental mechanisms are general, probabilistic, emergent and distributed across several levels of analyses. Several criticisms of the argument against ‘innate ideas’ are considered and rebutted.     

Could an autonomous syntax module have evolved?

Darwinian evolution necessitates a contribution to reproductive fitness. Recent studies of aphasia and Parkinson's disease show that functional syntactic ability involves neural structures that also are involved in speech motor control and nonlinguistic cognition. The evolution or presence of an autonomous syntax module is, therefore, implausible.     

Do infants have a sense of fairness?

Two experiments examined infants' expectations about how an experimenter should distribute resources and rewards to other individuals. In Experiment 1, 19-month-olds expected an experimenter to divide two items equally, as opposed to unequally, between two individuals. The infants held no particular expectation when the individuals were replaced with inanimate objects, or when the experimenter simply removed covers in front of the individuals to reveal the items (instead of distributing them). In Experiment 2, 21-month-olds expected an experimenter to give a reward to each of two individuals when both had worked to complete an assigned chore, but not when one of the individuals had done all the work while the other played. The infants held this expectation only when the experimenter could determine through visual inspection who had worked and who had not. Together, these results provide converging evidence that infants in the 2nd year of life already possess context-sensitive expectations relevant to fairness.     

Do infants bind mental states to agents?

Recent findings suggest that infants understand others’ preferential choice and can use the perspectives and beliefs of others to interpret their actions. The standard interpretation in the field is that infants understand preferential choice as a dispositional state of the agent. It is possible, however, that these social situations trigger the acquisition of more general, not person-specific knowledge. In a looking-time study we showed an Agent A demonstrating a choice, that only could have been interpreted as preferential based on the perspective (and thus the belief) of the agent, not the observer. Then we introduced a new agent (Agent B), who chose consistently or inconsistently with Agent A; also varying whether Agent B was an adult or a child. Results show that infants expected Agent B (both the adult and the child) to choose as Agent A, but only in the condition where according to Agent A’s knowledge two objects were present in familiarization(confirming previous evidence on the importance of contrastive choice). We interpret these results in the following way: (1) infants do not encode the perspectives of other agents as person-specific sources of knowledge and (2) they learn about the object, rather than the agent’s disposition towards that object. We propose that early theory of mind processes lack the binding of belief content to the belief holder. However, such limitation may in fact serve an important function, allowing infants to acquire information through the perspectives of others in the form of universal access to general information.     

Do young infants respond socially to human hands?

This study revealed that 4- and 6-month-old infants produced social-communicative behaviours only in response to faces, and not in response to hands. However, infants’ spontaneous responses to hands were unique in that they scanned the space above the hands, perhaps searching for a face.     

Do infants segment words or recurring contiguous patterns?

Eight experiments tested the hypothesis that infants' word segmentation abilities are reducible to familiar sound-pattern parsing regardless of actual word boundaries. This hypothesis was disconfirmed in experiments using the headturn preference procedure: 8.5-month-olds did not mis-segment a consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) word (e.g., dice) from passages containing the corresponding phonemic pattern across a word boundary (C#VC#; "cold ice"), but they segmented it when the word was really present ("roll dice"). However, they did not segment the real vowel-consonant (VC) word (ice in "cold ice") until 16 months. Yet, at that age, they still did not false alarm on the straddling CVC word. Thus, infants do not simply respond to recurring phonemic patterns. Instead, they are sensitive to both acoustic and allophonic cues to word boundaries. Moreover, there is a sizable developmental gap between consonant- and vowel-initial word segmentation.     

Do 10-month-old infants understand others' false beliefs?

As adults, we know that others’ mental states, such as beliefs, guide their behavior and that these mental states can deviate from reality. Researchers have examined whether young children possess adult-like theory of mind by focusing on their understanding about others’ false beliefs. The present research revealed that 10-month-old infants seemed to interpret a person’s choice of toys based on her true or false beliefs about which toys were present. These results indicate that like adults, even preverbal infants act as if they can consider others’ mental states when making inferences about others’ actions.     

Do 5-month-old infants see humans as material objects?

Infants expect objects to be solid and cohesive, and to move on continuous paths through space. In this study, we examine whether infants understand that human beings are material objects, subject to these same principles. We report that 5-month-old infants apply the constraint of continuous motion to inanimate blocks, but not to people. This suggests that young infants have two separate modes of construal: one for inanimate objects and another for humans.     

Do infants discriminate non-linguistic vocal expressions of positive emotions?

Adults are highly proficient in understanding emotional signals from both facial and vocal cues, including when communicating across cultural boundaries. However, the developmental origin of this ability is poorly understood, and in particular, little is known about the ontogeny of differentiation of signals with the same valence. The studies reported here employed a habituation paradigm to test whether preverbal infants discriminate between non-linguistic vocal expressions of relief and triumph. Infants as young as 6 months who had habituated to relief or triumph showed significant discrimination of relief and triumph tokens at test (i.e. greater recovery to the unhabituated stimulus type), when exposed to tokens from a single individual (Study 1). Infants habituated to expressions from multiple individuals showed less consistent discrimination in that consistent discrimination was only found when infants were habituated to relief tokens (Study 2). Further, infants tested with tokens from individuals from different cultures showed dishabituation only when habituated to relief tokens and only at 10–12 months (Study 3). These findings suggest that discrimination between positive emotional expressions develops early and is modulated by learning. Further, infants' categorical representations of emotional expressions, like those of speech sounds, are influenced by speaker-specific information.     

Do pointing gestures by infants provoke comments from adults?

In the field of developmental psychology, there is speculation that pointing gestures by infants are good precursors of infant language acquisition, and some researchers have found correlations between these pointing gestures and some indices of language acquisition. Infants’ pointing gestures are presumably related to language acquisition because they provoke verbal responses from adults. To test this, seven boys and six girls were observed during free play time in a nursery classroom, and post-pointing and matched-control data were collected. Comparison between these data confirmed that the nursery staff spoke to infants at a significantly earlier stage in post-pointing sequences, compared with control sequences, indicating that pointing gestures elicit verbal responses from adult caregivers.     

Do infants reach for perceived objects? A reply to Stiles-Davis

Stiles-Davis proposes that the infants in our experiments (Hofsten & Spelke, 1985) did not reach for perceived objects in order to manipulate them, but rather touched perceived surfaces in order to explore their boundaries. Her commentary raises questions about infants' perception of the boundaries, the unity, and the manipulability of objects. More deeply, it raises the question of what an object is for an infant. We consider each of these questions in turn, in light of our own findings and those of other studies of object-directed reaching, object perception, and the object concept. We suggest that young infants organize the visual world into entities that are bounded, unitary, and manipulable and that infants endow those entities with the core properties of physical objects.     

Do infants show social preferences for people differing in race?

Do infants develop meaningful social preferences among novel individuals based on their social group membership? If so, do these social preferences depend on familiarity on any dimension, or on a more specific focus on particular kinds of categorical information? The present experiments use methods that have previously demonstrated infants’ social preferences based on language and accent, and test for infants’ and young children’s social preferences based on race. In Experiment 1, 10-month-old infants took toys equally from own- and other-race individuals. In Experiment 2, 2.5-year-old children gave toys equally to own- and other-race individuals. When shown the same stimuli in Experiment 3, 5-year-old children, in contrast, expressed explicit social preferences for own-race individuals. Social preferences based on race therefore emerge between 2.5 and 5 years of age and do not affect social choices in infancy. These data will be discussed in relation to prior research finding that infants’ social preferences do, however, rely on language: a useful predictor of group or coalition membership in both modern times and humans’ evolutionary past.     

Is sensory processing an issue for infants with colic?

ObjectivesTo determine the association between sensory functioning, sleep, cry/fuss, and feeding behaviors of infants with colic younger than 4 months of age.MethodsDunn’s Infant/Toddler Sensory Profile™ and a modified Barr Baby Day Diary^© were used to assess 44 breastfed infants with colic under four months of age. Colic was defined according to Wessel’s criteria.ResultsThirty-four of the 44 infants with colic (77%) scored as atypical for sensory processing. Of these, 56% scored atypical for sensory processing on quadrant one (Q1) (Low Registration), with 24%, 65%, and 18% scoring as atypical for sensory processing on Q2 (Sensory seeking), Q3 (Sensory sensitivity), and Q4 (Sensation avoiding), respectively. All infants demonstrating sensation avoiding also scored as Low Threshold. A moderate statistically significant correlation was found between sensation seeking and time spent sleeping (r = 0.31; p = 0.04). No other statistically significant associations between infant behaviors and their sensory functioning were demonstrated. Overall, infants demonstrating atypical sensory responses (in any quadrant) slept significantly more than infants demonstrating typical sensory responses (mean difference = −67.8 min/day; 95% CI = −133.6 to −2.1; p = 0.04).ConclusionVery limited associations between infant behaviors and sensory functioning were demonstrated, suggesting that sensory functioning may not be a significant factor in the multifactorial nature of infant colic. Further well-designed studies using validated tools for infants with colic are required to determine whether associations between infant behaviors and sensory functioning exist.     

Do infants perceive the social robot Keepon as a communicative partner?

This study investigates if infants perceive an unfamiliar agent, such as the robot Keepon, as a social agent after observing an interaction between the robot and a human adult. 23 infants, aged 9–17 month, were exposed, in a first phase, to either a contingent interaction between the active robot and an active human adult, or to an interaction between an active human adult and the non-active robot, followed by a second phase, in which infants were offered the opportunity to initiate a turn-taking interaction with Keepon.The measured variables were: (1) the number of social initiations the infant directed toward the robot, and (2) the number of anticipatory orientations of attention to the agent that follows in the conversation. The results indicate a significant higher level of initiations in the interactive robot condition compared to the non-active robot condition, while the difference between the frequencies of anticipations of turn-taking behaviors was not significant.