Which building blocks for coordinating resource distribution are so basic that they manifest even in infancy?

Projektinformationen

COORDINATE

ID Finanzhilfevereinbarung: 101040978

DOI

10.3030/101040978

EK-Unterschriftsdatum 30 Juni 2022

Startdatum 1 Juli 2022

Enddatum 30 Juni 2027

Finanziert unter

• European Research Council (ERC)

Gesamtkosten

€ 1 500 000,00

EU-Beitrag

€ 1 500 000,00

Koordiniert durch

UNIVERSITETET I OSLO
Norway

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - COORDINATE (Which building blocks for coordinating resource distribution are so basic that they manifest even in infancy?)

Berichtszeitraum: 2022-07-01 bis 2024-12-31

Zusammenfassung vom Kontext und den Gesamtzielen des Projekts

The distribution of resources, help, territory and priority decision rights are central dilemmas for group-living species and at the core of human politics. Hence, COORDINATE will do political psychology with infants to reveal the meaningful mechanisms for coordinating resource distribution so basic that they motivate and manifest even in the preverbal mind.

So far, we have tested a total of 3437 infants and 1895 preschoolers to reveal the content and function of representations and motives for fundamental forms of resource distribution and coordination.

To do so, we have used measures of visual behavior and responses, including postdictive violation-of-expectation looking-time methodology (i.e. do infants look longer following social scenarios which we hypothesize will violate their expectations as compared to scenarios which we hypothesize will confirm them), predictive anticipatory looking (i.e. do infants make systematic predictions about whom resources will be given to, as measured by which agent they glance towards before any distributive actions have taken place), preferential looking (i.e. do infants spend longer looking at agents who perform one kind of resource distribution during test trials than to agents with a different form of distributive behavior), preferential reaching (i.e. after watching puppet show enactments of different forms of resource distribution, do infants selectively reach for puppets with specific forms of distributive behavior) and pupillometry (i.e. do infants show greater pupil dilation in response to watching forms off resource distribution which we hypothesize will violate their expectations).

A number of publications from this research program are now under review.

Arbeit, die ab Beginn des Projekts bis zum Ende des durch den Bericht erfassten Berichtszeitraums geleistet wurde, und die wichtigsten bis dahin erzielten Ergebnisse

Following up on my previous theoretical proposal that preverbal infants hold core cognitive representations of relational models (Thomsen & Carey, 2013), in COORDINATE we have so far tested +3400 infants and +1850 preschoolers, discovering a rich set of nuanced, core cognitive representations and motives for fundamental forms of resource distribution, using both postdictive VOE, predictive anticipatory looking and pupillometry amongst several other methods. We are currently in the process of publishing these results.

Fortschritte, die über den aktuellen Stand der Technik hinausgehen und voraussichtliche potenzielle Auswirkungen (einschließlich der bis dato erzielten sozioökonomischen Auswirkungen und weiter gefassten gesellschaftlichen Auswirkungen des Projekts)

Together, these results speak to and qualify our understanding of the altruism and thousands of years of political philosophy from Plato to Marx as seen through the eye of the core human mind.

Photo from the lab