Longitudinal Continuity in Understanding and Production of Giving‐Related Behavior From Infancy to Childhood

Abstract

Infants have an early understanding of giving (the transfer of an item by one agent to another), but little is known about individual differences in these abilities or their developmental outcomes. Here, 9-month-olds (N = 59) showing clearer neural processing (Event-related potential, ERP) of a give-me gesture also evidenced a stronger reaction (pupil dilation) to an inappropriate response to a give-me gesture, and at 2 years were more likely to give in response to a give-me gesture. None of the differences in understanding and production of giving-related behaviors were associated with other sociocognitive variables investigated: language, gaze-following, and nongiving helping. The early developmental continuity in understanding and production of giving behavior is consistent with the great importance of giving for humans throughout the life span.

Multimodal communication and language origins: integrating gestures and vocalizations

“…Despite the fundamentally different definitions of ‘gesture’ in human and non‐human research, comparative research often evaluates findings as if they constitute the very same thing. On the one hand, increasing evidence shows that a substantial proportion of gesture types used by human children is present in the ape repertoire (Blake, ; Gillespie‐Lynch et al, ; Juvrud et al, ; Kersken et al, ). However, this is not found for speech‐accompanying (‘co‐speech’) gestures, which are the best‐studied facet of human non‐conventional gestural communication (Goldin‐Meadow, ; McNeill, ; Kendon, ).…”

The teleological stance: Past, present, and future

“…The same pattern of results has since been replicated in a different context involving actors passing blocks. In this case infants show greater pupil dilation after seeing the inefficient action that is directed towards the recipient's head, more than to the efficient action directed towards the recipient's outstretched hand, suggesting that the pupil dilation response in not specific to a particular action or goal (Juvrud et al., 2018). When interpreted from a teleological perspective, infants might perceive the actions as intentional and apply the rationality principle to the events and become surprised when their hypothesis is not verified.…”

“…Juvrud et al., (2018) demonstrated that infants’ ability to evaluate goal‐directed actions in terms of rationality predicts collaborative and pro‐social interactions later in life. Using a paradigm similar to Gredebäck and Melinder (2010, 2011), infants ( N = 59) observed an actor passing an object in response to another actor performing the give‐me gesture (arm outstretch, palm up).…”

“…It is possible that infants used teleological processes to evaluate the actions in Juvrud et al. (2018). If that were the case, then teleological processes in infancy may be related to later cognitive processes with implications that extend beyond just interpreting other peoples’ goals and actions.…”

Does surprise enhance infant memory? Assessing the impact of the encoding context on subsequent object recognition

“…In addition, pre‐schoolers have been found to increase their exploration of toys that have previously violated their expectations (Bonawitz et al, 2012; Cook et al, 2011), possibly indicating that longer looking times in the traditional violation of expectation paradigms (Baillargeon, 1986; Baillargeon et al, 1985; Wynn, 1992) reflect infants' attempt to visually explore the event outcome that contradicted their expectations. Furthermore, the magnitude of surprise measured by pupil dilation has been linked to the strength of infants' prior predictions (Gredebäck et al, 2018; Juvrud et al, 2019), indicating that the mismatch between infants' expectations and the event outcome creates an error term, which is then fed back into the cognitive system.…”