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.
