Infants' understanding of social interaction

Project Information

infant interaction

Grant agreement ID: 275691

Closed project

Start date 1 June 2011

End date 31 May 2013

Funded under

• Specific programme "People" implementing the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Community for research, technological development and demonstration activities (2007 to 2013)

Total cost € 185 964,80

EU contribution € 185 964,80

Coordinated by

UPPSALA UNIVERSITET
Sweden

Final Report Summary - INFANT INTERACTION (Infants' understanding of social interaction)

Project objectives and findings:

From birth, infants live in a highly social environment and they have a predisposition to focus on the people around them. From previous research, we know that in just a few short years, infants’ knowledge of how other people act and interact grows immensely. What we know less about is how they learn this information. What are the roles of different kinds of social cues, such as speech and eye contact, given by other people? What role does experience with particular kinds of individuals take? The current project aimed to address these questions by examining the infants’ understanding of social interaction in infancy.
Specifically, the Infant Interaction project was based on two main objectives. The first was to determine when infants come to understand the joint and individual goals that underlie others’ social interactions and the second was to examine the role of social interaction experience in the development of social understanding in infancy. For both objectives, substantial research findings have been established and are being disseminated.
The first study addressed the first project objective of how infants develop the ability to recognize social interaction in others and bind their actions together into collaborative sequences. In this eye tracking study, we manipulated social cues between two actors – body orientation, gaze, and talking – to create both a social interaction and a comparable non-social situation. We then presented infants with actions by the two actors that were ambiguous as to whether they were part of a collaborative sequence (to move a block to one location and then another) or simply two individual actors’ goals (to each move a block to different location). We found that infants who saw the actors engaged in social interaction interpreted their actions on the blocks to be bound together as part of a collaborative sequence. That is, their anticipatory gaze indicated that they expected each actor to share the collaborative end goal. In contrast, infants who saw the non-social actors did not have this expectation.
A second study is now following up on the first to examine the developmental trajectory of this ability in infancy. We first replicated Study 1’s results with another group of 18-month-old infants and are now in the process of testing a second group of infants who are 14 months of age. Study 2’s procedure was modified to increase the number of gaze anticipations made by infants overall and to eliminate learning effects. The two main changes were that a salient light and sound action effect occurred each time a block was moved to a location and that in the test trials, an occluder was used to remove feedback to the infants about where the block was actually placed. The results for 18-month-olds show that did use the social cues to anticipate the actor’s collaborative goal. Data from 14-month-olds is still being collected, though we expect this younger group will be less proficient at anticipating the actions of others. Even though 14-month-olds are able to anticipate individual actor’s actions, anticipating actions based on inferences of others’ collaborative goals is more complicated, requiring more advanced knowledge of and experience with social interaction. Fourteen-month-olds are only just beginning to be able to collaborate with others in tasks that have two distinct roles. Thus, we expect to see an age difference in gaze anticipation with 18-month-olds showing more accurate anticipations to the collaborative goal location in the social condition than 14-month-olds do.
A third study examined the role of social experience on 24-month-old infants’ social learning from others. In this imitation study, infants observed demonstrations of novel toys by models who differed in both age and gender. That is, each toy was modeled by two individuals who differed on one dimension (age or gender) and each demonstrated a different action with the toy. Infants’ own actions on the toy were coded to determine which actions they performed more of. In one condition, when adults and four-year-old children of different genders were pitted against each other, 24-month-olds tended to imitate more of the actions demonstrated by females, with no effect of age. In another condition that made gender more salient, males and females of different ages were pitted against each other. In this second condition, 24-month-old girls again showed a bias to imitate more actions demonstrated by females, while boys did not show this bias. Together, the results suggest that social experience early in life with primarily female caregivers leads young children to focus more on learning actions from females. However, when gender is made salient, boys show less of this tendency. This is in line with later research showing that by three to four years of age, children prefer to imitate others of their own gender. Ours is the first study to show that earlier gender effects on imitation are biased toward females as an indicator that social experience affects social learning. This work is submitted for publication. Related to this work, Christine Fawcett was also asked to write a chapter on social referencing in infancy.

Significance of the findings:

The findings from this project significantly add to our understanding of infants’ development of social interaction. The first series of studies is the first to show that infants can use social context to bind actions together into collaborative sequences. Previous work has shown that infants break action sequences down based on individual actors’ goals, but this is the first to show that infants can also use inferred goals to bind actions across individuals. These findings have inspired a continuing line of research on action binding, which is part of an European Research Council grant that Christine Fawcett is now employed by.
The imitation studies are the first to specifically examine both age and gender of models during imitation tasks and to related the findings to children’s social interaction experience. These findings contribute to our understanding of children’s social learning and the contexts that affect their attention.
Together, the work contributes to the field of social cognitive development by furthering our understanding of the interplay between social interaction experience and understanding of interaction from a third party perspective.

Broader impacts:

Beyond the importance of this work for the field of social cognitive development, the findings have relevance for more applied areas of psychology. We have plans to explore the action binding phenomenon in various clinical populations, such as children with autism or callous unemotional traits to examine whether these children have difficulties with understanding social context in others’ interactions. This work thus has implications for child clinicians in particular.
More broadly, this project has lead to a new research position for Christine Fawcett at Uppsala University, thus furthering the research trajectory begun with the Marie Curie grant. Christine Fawcett has also begun to supervise PhD students, a further contribution to the advancement of high quality science within Europe.

Contact information:

Christine Fawcett: [e-mail]; [phone]

Gustaf Gredebäck: [e-mail]; [phone]