The role of gaze direction and mutual exclusivity in guiding 24‐month‐olds' word mappings

In these studies, we examined how a default assumption about word meaning, the mutual exclusivity assumption and an intentional cue, gaze direction, interacted to guide 24‐month‐olds' object‐word mappings. In Expt 1, when the experimenter's gaze was consistent with the mutual exclusivity assumption, novel word mappings were facilitated. When the experimenter's eye‐gaze was in conflict with the mutual exclusivity cue, children demonstrated a tendency to rely on the mutual exclusivity assumption rather than follow the experimenter's gaze to map the label to the object. In Expt 2, children relied on the experimenter's gaze direction to successfully map both a first label to a novel object and a second label to a familiar object. Moreover, infants mapped second labels to familiar objects to the same degree that they mapped first labels to novel objects. These findings are discussed with regard to children's use of convergent and divergent cues in indirect word mapping contexts.     

Experience with visual barriers and its effects on subsequent gaze‐following in 12‐ to 13‐month‐olds

Thirty 12‐ to 13‐month‐olds were tested to determine whether they could use the self as an analogy for understanding others' looking. Using a procedure similar to Brooks and Meltzoff (2002) , we examined gaze‐following when the adult's view of a target was occluded by a blindfold (blindfold without training). Some infants received experience with the blindfold's sight‐blocking qualities (blindfold with training). The control was a headband condition. Gaze‐following was highest in the headband condition. Gaze‐following in the headband and blindfold without training conditions, but not the blindfold with training conditions, were significantly greater than zero. These results demonstrate that 12‐ to 13‐month‐olds have some understanding of the looking behaviour of others. Only weak support was found for simulation theories of the development of social cognition.     

Inferring the size of a goal object from an actor's grasping movement in 6‐ and 9‐month‐old infants

The present study applied a preferential looking paradigm to test whether 6‐ and 9‐month old infants are able to infer the size of a goal object from an actor's grasping movement. The target object was a cup with the handle rotated either towards or away from the actor. In two experiments, infants saw the video of an actor's grasping movement towards an occluded target object. The aperture size of the actor's hand was varied as between‐subjects factor. Subsequently, two final states of the grasping movement were presented simultaneously with the occluder being removed. In Experiment 1, the expected final state showed the actor's hand holding a cup in a way that would be expected after the performed grasping movement. In the unexpected final state, the actor's hand held the cup at the side which would be unexpected after the performed grasping movement. Results show that 6‐ as well as 9‐month‐olds looked longer at the unexpected than at the expected final state. Experiment 2 excluded an alternative explanation of these findings, namely that the discrimination of the final states was due to geometrical familiarity or novelty of the final states. These findings provide evidence that infants are able to infer the size of a goal object from the aperture size of the actor's hand during the grasp.     

10‐month‐old infants’ inference of invisible agent: Distinction in causality between object motion and human action1

Abstract: Two habituation experiments investigated 10‐month‐old infants’ interpretation of events where a stationary object began to move without any visible causes. During habituation, infants saw that an object partly hidden by an occluder began to move away from the occluder. Then, they were tested with three test events without the occluder: the ?rst event showed a hand pushing the object, the second event showed a hand failing to touch the object, and the last event had no agent. The objects were a ball in Experiment 1, and a person in Experiment 2. The test event that the infants looked at for the shortest duration in Experiment 1 was where the hand pushed the ball, whereas they looked at the three test events almost equal amounts of time in Experiment 2. These results indicate that 10‐month‐old infants responded to the events in terms of causality and could infer the presence of the agent behind the occluder only when they saw the habituation event featuring the ball.