Level 1 perspective‐taking at 24 months of age

The current study sought to determine the age at which children first engage in Level 1 visual perspective‐taking, in which they understand that the content of what another person sees in a situation may sometimes differ from what they see. An adult entered the room searching for an object. One candidate object was out in the open, whereas another was visible for the child but behind an occluder from the adult's perspective. When asked to help the adult find the sought‐for object, 24‐month‐old children, but not 18‐month‐old children, handed him the occluded object (whereas in a control condition they showed no preference for the occluded toy). We argue that the performance of the 24‐month‐olds requires Level 1 visual perspective‐taking skills and that this is the youngest age at which these skills have been demonstrated.     

Therapeutic moments are the key: foster children give clues to their past experience of infant trauma and neglect

Foster parents often despair over the lack of information about the past experience of the children in their care, particularly with children who have experienced infant trauma and neglect. In the context of family therapy these unknowns pose both a challenge and an opportunity. The author proposes that foster children gives clues to their past experiences in therapeutic moments, which the therapist may recognize as a result of her own inner conversation. In conjunction with a sound theoretical knowledge of infant trauma and neglect, these moments have the capacity to open a dialogue in the relationships between therapist, child and foster family. This dialogical process offers an opportunity for the child's past experience of infant trauma and neglect to be expressed in silence, and the foster parent's present experience to be heard in stillness, opening for them a way to go on beyond the family therapy sessions.     

Prior visual inspection and object naming: Two factors that enhance hidden feature inclusion in young children's drawings

It is widely held that young children draw what they know rather than what they see. However, evidence is growing that they can be provoked into making visually realistic drawings. In this study two factors were found to affect the form of visual realism. In Expt 1, 5- and 6-year-olds produced visually realistic drawings of a familiar object when it was neither named nor given to the child to inspect before drawing. On the other hand, prior inspection led to significant hidden feature inclusion at 5 and 6 years, and this applied whether the object drawn was familiar or novel. Seven-year-olds' drawings were visually realistic in all presentation conditions. In Expt 2, 6-year-olds were shown to include the hidden feature if the object was named before drawing. Two conclusions are drawn. It is possible that children draw what they have seen over time rather than what they see at a particular time. Secondly, object naming may lead to drawing from a canonical model tagged by the object's name.     

The Sound of Social Cognition: Toddlers’ Understanding of How Sound Influences Others

Understanding others' perceptions is a fundamental aspect of social cognition. Children's construal of visual perception is well investigated, but there is little work on children's understanding of others' auditory perception. The current study assesses toddlers' recognition that producing different sounds can affect others differentially—auditory perspective taking. Two- and 3-year-olds were familiarized with two objects, one loud and one quiet. The adult then introduced a doll, and children were randomly assigned to one of two goals: either to wake the doll or to let her sleep. Children's object choice and the sound intensity they produced significantly varied in the predicted direction as a function of the goal task. These findings reveal young children's understanding of the effects of sound on other people's behavior and psychological states.     

Emotional expression and vocabulary learning in adults and children

A great deal of what we know about the world has not been learned via first-hand observation but thanks to others' testimony. A crucial issue is to know which kind of cues people use to evaluate information provided by others. In this context, recent studies in adults and children underline that informants' facial expressions could play an essential role. To test the importance of the other's emotions in vocabulary learning, we used two avatars expressing happiness, anger or neutral emotions when proposing different verbal labels for an unknown object. Experiment 1 revealed that adult participants were significantly more likely than chance to choose the label suggested by the avatar displaying a happy face over the label suggested by the avatar displaying an angry face. Experiment 2 extended these results by showing that both adults and children as young as 3 years old showed this effect. These data suggest that decision making concerning newly acquired information depends on informant's expressions of emotions, a finding that is consistent with the idea that behavioural intents have facial signatures that can be used to detect another's intention to cooperate.     

Object-based auditory facilitation of visual search for pictures and words with frequent and rare targets

Auditory and visual processes demonstrably enhance each other based on spatial and temporal coincidence. Our recent results on visual search have shown that auditory signals also enhance visual salience of specific objects based on multimodal experience. For example, we tend to see an object (e.g., a cat) and simultaneously hear its characteristic sound (e.g., “meow”), to name an object when we see it, and to vocalize a word when we read it, but we do not tend to see a word (e.g., cat) and simultaneously hear the characteristic sound (e.g., “meow”) of the named object. If auditory–visual enhancements occur based on this pattern of experiential associations, playing a characteristic sound (e.g., “meow”) should facilitate visual search for the corresponding object (e.g., an image of a cat), hearing a name should facilitate visual search for both the corresponding object and corresponding word, but playing a characteristic sound should not facilitate visual search for the name of the corresponding object. Our present and prior results together confirmed these experiential association predictions. We also recently showed that the underlying object-based auditory–visual interactions occur rapidly (within 220 ms) and guide initial saccades towards target objects. If object-based auditory–visual enhancements are automatic and persistent, an interesting application would be to use characteristic sounds to facilitate visual search when targets are rare, such as during baggage screening. Our participants searched for a gun among other objects when a gun was presented on only 10% of the trials. The search time was speeded when a gun sound was played on every trial (primarily on gun-absent trials); importantly, playing gun sounds facilitated both gun-present and gun-absent responses, suggesting that object-based auditory–visual enhancements persistently increase the detectability of guns rather than simply biasing gun-present responses. Thus, object-based auditory–visual interactions that derive from experiential associations rapidly and persistently increase visual salience of corresponding objects.     

Words,shape, visual search and visual working memory in 3‐year‐old children

Do words cue children's visual attention, and if so, what are the relevant mechanisms? Across four experiments, 3‐year‐old children (N = 163) were tested in visual search tasks in which targets were cued with only a visual preview versus a visual preview and a spoken name. The experiments were designed to determine whether labels facilitated search times and to examine one route through which labels could have their effect: By influencing the visual working memory representation of the target. The targets and distractors were pictures of instances of basic‐level known categories and the labels were the common name for the target category. We predicted that the label would enhance the visual working memory representation of the target object, guiding attention to objects that better matched the target representation. Experiments 1 and 2 used conjunctive search tasks, and Experiment 3 varied shape discriminability between targets and distractors. Experiment 4 compared the effects of labels to repeated presentations of the visual target, which should also influence the working memory representation of the target. The overall pattern fits contemporary theories of how the contents of visual working memory interact with visual search and attention, and shows that even in very young children heard words affect the processing of visual information.     

Infant shifting attention from an adult’s face to an adult’s hand: a precursor of joint attention

Two experiments were designed to investigate shifting attention from an adult’s face to an adult’s hand by 3- and 4-month-olds. In Experiment 1, 24 infants were presented with five types of hand gestures by their mothers and a stranger. Experiment 2 was given to 22 infants with the same procedures, except for the addition of a head inclining while pointing to objects. The results were: (1) after encountering an averted head repeatedly, the infants shifted their attention from the adult’s face to the moving hand and objects; they oriented to what the adult was attending to. (2) The moving head improved the rate of infants turning their heads to the same direction as the adult. The conclusion was averted head and eyes play a major role in infants’ orienting to an adult’s hand. A hand was a shared visual target during the adult’s object performance, indicating that infants’ orientation to the adults’ hand is a precursor stage of joint visual attention.     

Crossmodal binding in localizing objects outside the field of view

Using virtual reality techniques we created a virtual room within which participants could orient themselves by means of a head-mounted display. Participants were required to search for a nonimmediately visually available object attached to different parts of the virtual room's walls. The search could be guided by a light and/or a sound emitted by the object. When the object was found participants engaged it with a sighting circle. The time taken by participants to initiate the search and to engage the target object was measured. Results from three experiments suggest that (1) advantages in starting the search, finding, and engaging the object were found when the object emitted both light and sound; (2) these advantages disappeared when the visual and auditory information emitted by the object was separated in time by more than 150 ms; (3) misleading visual information determined a greater level of interference than misleading auditory information (e.g., sound from one part of the room, light from the object).     

Recognition and attention guidance during contextual cueing in real-world scenes: Evidence from eye movements

When confronted with a previously encountered scene, what information is used to guide search to a known target? We contrasted the role of a scene's basic-level category membership with its specific arrangement of visual properties. Observers were repeatedly shown photographs of scenes that contained consistently but arbitrarily located targets, allowing target positions to be associated with scene content. Learned scenes were then unexpectedly mirror reversed, spatially translating visual features as well as the target across the display while preserving the scene's identity and concept. Mirror reversals produced a cost as the eyes initially moved toward the position in the display in which the target had previously appeared. The cost was not complete, however; when initial search failed, the eyes were quickly directed to the target's new position. These results suggest that in real-world scenes, shifts of attention are initially based on scene identity, and subsequent shifts are guided by more detailed information regarding scene and object layout.     

“He Couldn't Have Done It,He Was With Me!”: The Impact of Alibi Witness Age and Relationship

Undergraduate participants who conducted a simulated police investigation were presented with either a child (6 years old) or adult (25 years old) alibi witness, who was either the son or neighbor of the participant's suspect. Replicating previous research, participants were more likely to believe the adult neighbor alibi witness than the adult son. In fact, an alibi provided by the adult son actually proved detrimental to that suspect, as participants thought the suspect was more likely to be guilty after viewing an alibi provided by the adult son. However, child‐provided alibis reduced perceptions of suspect guilt, regardless of that child's relationship to the suspect. The child alibi witnesses were also viewed by the participants as more credible than the adult witnesses. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Effects of Adult Suggestion and Child Consistency on Young Children's Reports1

The purpose of the present study was to contrast the effects of children's response consistency and adult leading questions in a structured memory interview. Children (N = 70) who viewed a 2‐min video clip were asked 3 questions (leading, misleading, and neutral) related to the video. Children's responses (assent vs. deny) were predicted by the type of question asked by the adult (neutral, leading, and misleading), but not by the previous response given by the child or the child's age in months. Specifically, children assented the least often to misleading questions. Accuracy was predicted by both question type and in the last question–answer pair, children's previous response accuracy. These findings are discussed with relation to interview dynamics.     

Characteristic sounds make you look at target objects more quickly

When you are looking for an object, does hearing its characteristic sound make you find it more quickly? Our recent results supported this possibility by demonstrating that when a cat target, for example, was presented among other objects, a simultaneously presented “meow” sound (containing no spatial information) reduced the manual response time for visual localization of the target. To extend these results, we determined how rapidly an object-specific auditory signal can facilitate target detection in visual search. On each trial, participants fixated a specified target object as quickly as possible. The target’s characteristic sound speeded the saccadic search time within 215–220 msec and also guided the initial saccade toward the target, compared with presentation of a distractor’s sound or with no sound. These results suggest that object-based auditory—visual interactions rapidly increase the target object’s salience in visual search.     

The Role of Social Contacts in the Successful Job Search

This study examined the impact of social contacts (“It's who you know, not what you know”) on job getting. Workers were interviewed to discover the source of information about their most recent job. Results show that social contacts were the most frequently used resources during the job-getting process and that these personal contacts were used more often in some occupational environments than in others.     

From Here to Eternity Children's Acquisition of Understanding of Projective Size on Television

This study attempts to trace children's acquisition of understanding of projective size (e.g., getting closer to and farther away from an object) as depicted on television through two distinctive techniques—zooming in/out and multiple edits. Unlike previous research in this area, this investigation applied aspects of cognitive processing that have been identified as untapped through gross Piagetian measures—Level 1 and Level 2 knowledge of visual perception (Pillow & Flavell, 1986). Findings suggest that children classified as “preoperational” by Piagetian standards, but possessing Level 1 knowledge of visual perception—the ability to infer what objects can or cannot be seen from another person's viewpoint—are capable of understanding the more simple form of projective size; children possessing Level 2 knowledge—the ability to infer the nature, as well as the content, of another person's visual experience—have a better comprehension of the more complex, edited presentation of projective size. Level of television consumption plays a role in children's acquisition of understanding of television information.     

The Epistemic Challenge of Hearing Child’s Voice

Classical conceptual distinctions in philosophy of education assume an individualistic subjectivity and hide the learning that can take place in the space between child (as educator) and adult (as learner). Grounded in two examples from experience I develop the argument that adults often put metaphorical sticks in their ears in their educational encounters with children. Hearers’ prejudices cause them to miss out on knowledge offered by the child, but not heard by the adult. This has to do with how adults view education, knowledge, as much as child, and is even more extreme when child is also black. The idea is what Miranda Fricker calls ‘epistemic injustice’ which occurs when someone is wronged specifically in their capacity as a knower. Although her work concerns gender and race, I extrapolate her radical ideas to (black) child. Awareness of the epistemic injustice that is done to children and my proposal for increased epistemic modesty and epistemic equality could help transform pedagogical spaces to include child subjects as educators. A way forward is suggested that involves ‘cracking’ the concept of child and a different non-individualised conception of education.     

Can't stop believing: inhibitory control and resistance to misleading testimony

Why are some young children consistently willing to believe what they are told even when it conflicts with first‐hand experience? In this study, we investigated the possibility that this deference reflects an inability to inhibit a prepotent response. Over the course of several trials, 2.5‐ to 3.5‐year‐olds (N = 58) heard an adult contradict their report of a simple event they had both witnessed, and children were asked to resolve this discrepancy. Those who repeatedly deferred to the adult's misleading testimony had more difficulty on an inhibitory control task involving spatial conflict than those who responded more skeptically. These results suggest that responding skeptically to testimony that conflicts with first‐hand experience may be challenging for some young children because it requires inhibiting a normally appropriate bias to believe testimony.     

Secondhand information and social judgment

This research investigates how secondhand impressions of other people differ from those based on firsthand information. It was hypothesized that secondhand impressions are often more extreme because secondhand accounts of another person's actions frequently fail to convey adequately the role of mitigating circumstances and situational constraints in producing that person's behavior. Experiments 1 and 2 tested this hypothesis by exposing “first generation” subjects to information about a target person, having them rate the target on several trait and attribution scales, and having them describe the target person's actions to a group of “second generation” subjects. As predicted, second generation subjects made more extreme ratings of the target than their first generation counterparts. Content analyses of the accounts transmitted by first generation subjects indicated that they did indeed underemphasize various situational qualifications of the target persons' behavior. Experiment 3 extended these findings by demonstrating that people's impressions of someone they have often heard about from a friend (but never met) are more extreme than their friends' more informed impressions.     

Fourteen-month-olds know what others experience only in joint engagement

We investigated how 14‐month‐old infants know what others know. In two studies, an infant played with each of two objects in turn while an experimenter was present. Then the experimenter left the room, and the infant played with a third object with an assistant. The experimenter returned, faced all three objects, and said excitedly ‘Look! Can you give it to me?’ In Study 1, the experimenter experienced each of the first two toys in episodes of joint visual engagement (without manipulation) with the infant. In response to her excited request infants gave the experimenter the object she did not know, thus demonstrating that they knew which ones she knew. In Study 2, infants witnessed the experimenter jointly engage around each of the experienced toys with the assistant, from a third‐person perspective. In response to her request, infants did not give the experimenter the object she had not experienced. In combination with other studies, these results suggest that to know what others have experienced 14‐month‐old infants must do more than just perceive others perceiving something; they must engage with them actively in joint engagement.     

Development of perception of the unity of musical events

Infants' and young children's perception of the unity of musical events was investigated in three studies. In the first two, children watched video displays of two musicians playing different musical instruments side by side in synchrony, and heard a soundtrack in synchrony with both instruments but specific to one. The children judged which instrument was producing the music they heard. Three- to 4-year-olds differentiated instruments from different families but not instruments from the same family. Five- to 7-year-olds additionally differentiated instrument pairs differing in size and pitch range (e.g., violin, cello). In the third study, infants were presented some of the same musical events in order to assess whether specific experience with the instruments is necessary for perceiving the unity of musical events. Looking times revealed that 7- to 9-month-olds detected the correspondence of the sight and sound of some musical instruments. Specific experience with a variety of instruments is evidently not necessary for detecting correspondences of audible and visible properties and for differentiating instruments from different families.