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

Informations projet

COORDINATE

N° de convention de subvention: 101040978

DOI

10.3030/101040978

Date de signature de la CE 30 Juin 2022

Date de début 1 Juillet 2022

Date de fin 30 Juin 2027

Financé au titre de

• European Research Council (ERC)

Coût total

€ 1 500 000,00

Contribution de l’UE

€ 1 500 000,00

Coordonné par

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?)

Période du rapport: 2022-07-01 au 2024-12-31

Résumé du contexte et des objectifs généraux du projet

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.

Travail effectué depuis le début du projet jusqu’à la fin de la période considérée dans le rapport et principaux résultats atteints jusqu’à présent

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.

Progrès au-delà de l’état des connaissances et impact potentiel prévu (y compris l’impact socio-économique et les conséquences sociétales plus larges du projet jusqu’à présent)

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