Do young infants respond socially to human hands?

Slaughter, Virginia; Neary, Philippa

doi:10.1016/j.infbeh.2011.01.004

Cited by 3 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…Context is useful for detecting hands on the basis of surrounding body parts in ambiguous images. Developmental evidence indicates that infants associate hands with other body parts at approximately 6-9 mo (29) [possibly earlier with faces (30,31)]. We therefore included in the model an existing algorithm that uses surrounding body parts, including the face, for hand detection (32).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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From simple innate biases to complex visual concepts

Ullman

Harari

Dorfman

2012

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Early in development, infants learn to solve visual problems that are highly challenging for current computational methods. We present a model that deals with two fundamental problems in which the gap between computational difficulty and infant learning is particularly striking: learning to recognize hands and learning to recognize gaze direction. The model is shown a stream of natural videos and learns without any supervision to detect human hands by appearance and by context, as well as direction of gaze, in complex natural scenes. The algorithm is guided by an empirically motivated innate mechanism-the detection of "mover" events in dynamic images, which are the events of a moving image region causing a stationary region to move or change after contact. Mover events provide an internal teaching signal, which is shown to be more effective than alternative cues and sufficient for the efficient acquisition of hand and gaze representations. The implications go beyond the specific tasks, by showing how domain-specific "proto concepts" can guide the system to acquire meaningful concepts, which are significant to the observer but statistically inconspicuous in the sensory input.A basic question in cognitive development is how we learn to understand the world on the basis of sensory perception and active exploration. Already in their first months of life, infants rapidly learn to recognize complex objects and events in their visual input (1-3). Probabilistic learning models, as well as connectionist and dynamical models, have been developed in recent years as powerful tools for extracting the unobserved causes of sensory signals (4-6). Some of these models can efficiently discover significant statistical regularities in the observed signals, which may be subtle and of high order, and use them to construct world models and guide behavior (7-10). However, even powerful statistical models have inherent difficulties with natural cognitive concepts, which depend not only on statistical regularities in the sensory input but also on their significance and meaning to the observer. For example, in learning to understand actions and goals, an important part is identifying the agents' hands, their configuration, and their interactions with objects (1-3). This is an example in which significant and meaningful features can be nonsalient and highly variable and therefore difficult to learn. Our testing shows that current computational methods for general object detection (11-13) applied to large training data do not result by themselves in automatically learning about hands. In contrast, detecting hands (14), paying attention to what they are doing (15, 16), and using them to make inferences and predictions (1-3, 17) are natural for humans and appear early in development. How is it possible for infants to acquire such concepts in early development?A large body of developmental studies has suggested that the human cognitive system is equipped through evolution with basic innate structures that facilitate the acquisition of meaningf...

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Future studies may resolve whether the sensitivity to mover events is based on some innate capacity or learned early in development, on the basis of an even simpler capacity. The algorithm also uses in an innate manner the spatiotemporal continuity in tracking and an association made by infants between hands and face features (30,31).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

From simple innate biases to complex visual concepts

Ullman

Harari

Dorfman

2012

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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“…Infants attend to hands from birth (Van der Meer, 1997; White, Castle, & Held, 1964), suggesting early exposure to this socially significant body part. Slaughter and Neary (2011) found no statistical difference in 4- and 6-month-olds’ attention to hands versus faces although infants behaviorally responded more to faces than to hands. These researchers also reported that infants in their study looked at locations above hands as if they expected hands to be associated with faces.…”

Section: Hand Processing In Infancymentioning

confidence: 56%

“…Many studies have examined infants’ systematic attention to hands (e.g., Aslin, 2009; Deák, Krasno, Triesch, Lewis, & Sepeta, 2014; Frank, Vul, & Saxe, 2012; Slaughter & Neary, 2011; Yoshida & Smith, 2008; Yu & Smith, 2013). Infants attend to hands from birth (Van der Meer, 1997; White, Castle, & Held, 1964), suggesting early exposure to this socially significant body part.…”

Section: Hand Processing In Infancymentioning

confidence: 99%

Experimental evidence of structural representation of hands in early infancy

Jubran

White

Chroust

et al. 2018

International Journal of Behavioral Development

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Hands convey important social information, such as an individual’s emotions, goals, and desires, are used to direct attention through pointing, and are a major organ for haptic perception. However, very little is known about infants’ representation of human hands. In Experiment 1, infants tested in a familiarization/novelty preference task discriminated between images of intact hands and ones that contained first-order structure distortions (i.e., with locations of fingers altered to result in an unnatural configuration). In Experiment 2, infants tested in a spontaneous preference task exhibited a preference for scrambled hand images over intact images, indicating that 3.5-month-olds have gained sufficient sensitivity to the configural properties of hands to discriminate between intact versus scrambled images without any training in the laboratory. In both procedures, infants’ performance was disrupted by inversion of images, suggesting that infants’ performance in the upright conditions was not based on low-level features. These results indicate that sensitivity to the structure of hands develops early in life. This early development may lay the foundation for the development of the functional use of hand information for social communication.

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“…Within 6 to 10 mo, infants expect hands to make contact with objects ( 18 ) and to cause them to move ( 19 ). At about the same time, infants often shift their gaze from faces to hands engaged in object manipulation ( 20 , 21 ). Ullman et al.…”

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confidence: 99%

Gaze following requires early visual experience

Zohary

Harari

Ullman

et al. 2022

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Significance Early in life, humans spontaneously learn to extract complex visual information without external guidance. Current vision models fail to replicate such learning, relying instead on extensive supervision. A classic example is gaze understanding, an early-learned skill useful for joint attention and social interaction. We studied gaze understanding in children who recovered from early-onset near-complete blindness through late cataract surgery. Following treatment, they acquired sufficient visual acuity for detailed pattern recognition, but they failed to develop automatic gaze following. Our computational modeling suggests that their learning is severely limited due to reduced availability of internal self-supervision mechanisms, which guide learning in normal development. The results have implications to understanding natural visual learning, potential rehabilitation, and obtaining unsupervised learning in vision models.

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Do young infants respond socially to human hands?

Cited by 3 publications

References 12 publications

From simple innate biases to complex visual concepts

From simple innate biases to complex visual concepts

Experimental evidence of structural representation of hands in early infancy

Gaze following requires early visual experience

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