RESHARED POST FROM DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY…

“After seeing a triangle beat a pentagon to an object of ‘banana’ status, 12 month olds looked for longer when they were then presented with an incongruent trial where the pentagon gained over the triangle. 9 month olds (understandably?) couldn’t care less. So, on the basis of this social interaction alone, the 12 month olds were able to notice when something unexpected happened.”

“To rule out the possibility that this was just the result of some simple heuristic such as “when triangle and pentagon are present, triangle gets the object” and make sure the infants really were assigning some dominance, another experiment (with 12 and 15 month olds) showed the same test video of the two agents collecting little objects. This time, however, the preceding video was of the triangle dominating a little walled-in space that the pentagon also wanted to inhabit. The 12 month olds had no idea what was up, but the 15 month olds generalised from the first “get out of my room” interaction to the “I get the last banana” interaction. So, 15 month olds can extract, just from watching a social interaction, the dominance status of agents and can generalise that information to novel situations. So if a 15 month old watches you lose your favourite seat in front of the TV, they’ll also expect you to miss out on the last slice of pizza, because you’re a loser.”

Developmental Psychology News originally shared this post:

15-mo-olds (and, to a lesser extent, 12-mo-olds) expect an asymmetric relationship between two agents to remain stable from one conflict to another. Infants’ expectation of stability originates from their representation of social dominance as a relationship between two agents rather than as an individual property.

Link to PNAS paper: http://goo.gl/WZjRi
#infantdpn #socialemotionaldpn

Babies know who’s boss, whose boss, and who knows what else.

A forthcoming paper (grateful nod to ICCI) in PNAS from Oliver Mascaro and Gergely Csibra presents a series of experiments investigating the representation of social dominance relations in human infa…