Examining the role of social cues in early word learning

Infants watched a video of an adult pointing towards two different objects while hearing novel labels. Analyses indicated that 14- and 18-month-olds looked longer at the target object, but only 18-month-olds showed word learning. The results suggest that different types of social cues are available at different ages.     

In any way,shape, or form? Toddlers’ understanding of shapes

Using the intermodal preferential looking paradigm, two-year-old children’s ability to discriminate valid (typical and atypical) squares, rectangles, triangles, and circles from invalid distractors was examined. The cognitive and environmental factors that might predict this ability were also investigated. Two-year-old children (N = 33) were able to discriminate squares, triangles, and circles, but not rectangles. No significant cognitive or environmental predictors of this ability were found. The results suggest that the ability to shape discriminate at age two is under considerable development and that other factors may be responsible for children’s ability to discriminate shapes.     

Overshadowing the Reminiscence Bump: Memories of a Struggle for Independence

We describe a study in which young and older groups of Bangladeshi participants recalled and dated autobiographical memories from across the lifespan. Memories were subsequently plotted in terms of the age of participants at time of encoding. As expected the reminiscence bump, preferential recall of memories from the period of 10 to 30 years of age, was observed. This was very marked in the younger group and but less so in the older group who also showed a second bump in the period 35 to 55 years of age. This second bump corresponded to the period of national conflict between Pakistan and the Bengalee people that resulted in the formation of an independent Bangladesh. It is proposed that both the reminiscence bump and later periods of unexpected rises in recall can be accounted for by the raised accessibility of sets of memories and this in turn is a product of the privileged encoding of highly self-relevant experiences.     

The use of social and salience cues in early word learning

This article explores young infants' ability to learn new words in situations providing tightly controlled social and salience cues to their reference. Four experiments investigated whether, given two potential referents, 15-month-olds would attach novel labels to (a) an image toward which a digital recording of a face turned and gazed, (b) a moving image versus a stationary image, (c) a moving image toward which the face gazed, and (d) a gazed-on image versus a moving image. Infants successfully used the recorded gaze cue to form new word-referent associations and also showed learning in the salience condition. However, their behavior in the salience condition and in the experiments that followed suggests that, rather than basing their judgments of the words' reference on the mere presence or absence of the referent's motion, infants were strongly biased to attend to the consistency with which potential referents moved when a word was heard.     

Task instructions and implicit theory of mind

It has been hypothesized that humans are able to track other’s mental states efficiently and without being conscious of doing so using their implicit theory of mind (iToM) system. However, while iToM appears to operate unconsciously recent work suggests it does draw on executive attentional resources ( Schneider, Lam, Bayliss, & Dux, 2012) bringing into question whether iToM is engaged efficiently. Here, we examined other aspects relating to automatic processing: The extent to which the operation of iToM is controllable and how it is influenced by behavioral intentions. This was implemented by assessing how task instructions affect eye-movement patterns in a Sally–Anne false-belief task. One group of subjects was given no task instructions (No Instructions), another overtly judged the location of a ball a protagonist interacted with (Ball Tracking) and a third indicated the location consistent with the actor’s belief about the ball’s location (Belief Tracking). Despite different task goals, all groups’ eye-movement patterns were consistent with belief analysis, and the No Instructions and Ball Tracking groups reported no explicit mentalizing when debriefed. These findings represent definitive evidence that humans implicitly track the belief states of others in an uncontrollable and unintentional manner.     

The dynamics of intermodal matching: Seven- and 12-month-olds' intermodal matching of affect

The purpose of this experiment was to examine whether and how a common methodological difference frequently employed within the intermodal matching procedure affects infants' intermodal matching. Specifically we examined the effects of incorporating or excluding silent control trials on seven- and 12-month-olds' intermodal matching of affect. Results revealed that seven-month-olds showed reliable matching when presented all in-sound trials whereas 12-month-olds showed reliable matching when half of the trials were presented silently and half of the trials were presented in-sound. Results are discussed in terms of the dynamics of infant attention and those conditions where the inclusion of silent trials may be appropriate.     

Attentional orienting across the sensory modalities

This event-related potential study investigated (i) to what extent incongruence between attention-directing cue and cued target modality affects attentional control processes that bias the system in advance to favor a particular stimulus modality and (ii) to what extent top-down attentional control mechanisms are generalized for the type of information that is to be attended. To this end, both visual and auditory word cues were used to instruct participants to direct attention to a specific visual (color) or auditory (pitch) stimulus feature of a forthcoming multisensory target stimulus. Effects of cue congruency were observed within 200 ms post-cue over frontal scalp regions and related to processes involved in shifting attention from the cue modality to the modality of the task-relevant target feature. Both directing visual attention and directing auditory attention were associated with dorsal posterior positivity, followed by sustained fronto-central negativity. However, this fronto-central negativity appeared to have an earlier onset and was more pronounced when the visual modality was cued. Together the present results suggest that the mechanisms involved in deploying attention are to some extent determined by the modality (visual, auditory) in which attention operates, and in addition, that some of these mechanisms can also be affected by cue congruency.     

Rapid word learning in 13- and 17-month-olds in a naturalistic two-word procedure: looking versus reaching measures

This study investigated infants’ rapid learning of two novel words using a preferential looking measure compared with a preferential reaching measure. In Experiment 1, 21 13-month-olds and 20 17-month-olds were given 12 novel label exposures (6 per trial) for each of two novel objects. Next, in the label comprehension tests, infants were shown both objects and were asked, “Where’s the [label]?” (looking preference) and then told, “Put the [label] in the basket” (reaching preference). Only the 13-month-olds showed rapid word learning on the looking measure; neither age group showed rapid word learning on the reaching measure. In Experiment 2, the procedure was repeated 24 h later with 10 participants per age group from Experiment 1. After a further 12 labels per object, both age groups now showed robust evidence of rapid word learning, but again only on the looking measure. This is the earliest looking-based evidence of rapid word learning in infants in a well-controlled (i.e., two-word) procedure; our failure to replicate previous reports of rapid word learning in 13-month-olds with a preferential reaching measure may be due to our use of more rigorous controls for object preferences. The superior performance of the younger infants on the looking measure in Experiment 1 was not straightforwardly predicted by existing theoretical accounts of word learning.     

Newborns’ attention is driven by the translational movement

The present study investigated whether 2-day-old newborns are able to discriminate two translating meaningless Point-Light Displays (PLD) videos, in which the shape of one of them changes compared to that of the other along the trajectory, independently from movement kinematics, and if this ability is present both when stimuli differed at the end or at the beginning of the movement. To manipulate the instant in which along the movement the difference between stimuli was evident, and to maintain every unspecific dissimilarity possibly determining the preference, videos were played in a loop either forward or backwards. In Experiment 1, PLD stimuli moved with natural accelerated-decelerated kinematics; in Experiment 2 they moved at constant velocity. Four groups of newborns were submitted to the preferential looking technique experiments. Results showed that newborns looked longer at natural kinematics and that, irrespective of the type of kinematics, they discriminated the two stimuli only when videos were played forward, that is, only when stimuli differed at the end of the movement. These data suggest that, independently from kinematics, movement translational components induce newborns to allocate attention at the end of the observed movement. Given the strict link between attention and eye movements, we suggest that this effect may bootstrap the system and give rise to proactive gaze, the typical gaze behaviour present during executed and observed goal-directed actions.     

Preschoolers,adolescents, and adults visually anticipate an agent's efficient action; but only after having observed it frequently

The present study examined the contribution of efficiency reasoning and statistical learning on visual action anticipation in preschool children, adolescents, and adults. To this end, Experiment 1 assessed proactive eye movements of 5-year-old children, 15-year-old adolescents, and adults, who observed an agent stating the intent to reach a goal as quickly as possible. Subsequently the agent could four times either take a short, hence efficient, or long, hence inefficient, path to get to the goal. The results showed that in the first trial participants in none of the age groups predicted above chance level that the agent would produce the efficient action. Instead, we observed an age-dependent increase in action predictions in the subsequent repeated presentation of the same action. Experiment 2 ruled out that participants’ nonconsideration of the efficient path was due to a lack of understanding of the agent's action goal. Moreover, it demonstrated that 5-year-old children do predict that the agent will act efficiently when verbally reasoning about his future action. Overall, the study supports the view that rapid learning from frequency information guides visual action anticipations.