Preschool‐Aged Children Jointly Consider Others’ Emotional Expressions and Prior Knowledge to Decide When to Explore

Wu, Yang; Gweon, Hyowon

doi:10.1111/cdev.13585

Cited by 17 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 61 publications

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“…Similarly, another study involving mothers and infants interacting together with a surprise-inducing toy found that the mothers’ exclamations of surprise became more high-pitched when they noticed that their children did not react with surprise to the toy (Reissland et al, 2002). Along similar lines, Wu and Gweon (2021) introduced 3- to 4-year-old children to a novel toy with one salient casual function that the children first learned about. The children then saw an adult play with the toy.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Play in predictive minds: A cognitive theory of play.

Andersen¹,

Kiverstein²,

Miller³

et al. 2023

Psychological Review

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In this article, we argue that a predictive processing framework (PP) may provide elements for a proximate model of play in children and adults. We propose that play is a behavior in which the agent, in contexts of freedom from the demands of certain competing cognitive systems, deliberately seeks out or creates surprising situations that gravitate toward sweet-spots of relative complexity with the goal of resolving surprise. We further propose that play is experientially associated with a feel-good quality because the agent is reducing significant levels of prediction error (i.e., surprise) faster than expected. We argue that this framework can unify a range of well-established findings in play and developmental research that highlights the role of play in learning, and that casts children as Bayesian learners. The theory integrates the role of positive valence in play (i.e., explaining why play is fun); and what it is to be in a playful mood. Central to the account is the idea that playful agents may create and establish an environment tailored to the generation and further resolution of surprise and uncertainty. Play emerges here as a variety of niche construction where the organism modulates its physical and social environment in order to maximize the productive potential of surprise.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Play in predictive minds: A cognitive theory of play.

Andersen¹,

Kiverstein²,

Miller³

et al. 2023

Psychological Review

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“…However, when the adult is already familiar with the object, even infants interpret the expression as directed toward something else (e.g., another toy or a specific part of the toy; Moll et al, 2006). By preschool years, children jointly consider another person's emotional expression (e.g., surprise vs. happiness) and prior knowledge to infer the presence of a hidden causal function of a toy and modulate their own exploration accordingly (Wu & Gweon, 2021). Other work suggests that children even use others' emotional reactions to different states of a toy (e.g., getting broken or fixed) to infer who owns the toy (Pesowski & Friedman, 2016).…”

Section: Emotion As Information About External Eventsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Emotion as Information in Early Social Learning

Schulz

Frank

et al. 2021

Curr Dir Psychol Sci

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The majority of research on infants’ and children’s understanding of emotional expressions has focused on their abilities to use emotional expressions to infer how other people feel. However, an emerging body of work suggests that emotional expressions support rich, powerful inferences not just about emotional states but also about other unobserved states, such as hidden events in the physical world and mental states of other people (e.g., beliefs and desires). Here we argue that infants and children harness others’ emotional expressions as a source of information for learning about the physical and social world broadly. This “emotion as information” framework integrates affective, developmental, and computational cognitive sciences, extending the scope of signals that count as “information” in early learning.

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“…Similar inferences are seen in young children. For example, preschoolers use statistical information to infer preferences (Heck et al, 2021; Kushnir et al, 2010; see also Diesendruck et al, 2015; Ma & Xu, 2011; Vélez & Gweon, 2020) and emotions (Asaba et al, 2019; Doan et al, 2020; see also Doan et al, 2018; Wu & Gweon, 2021 for inferences about surprise). Together this growing body of findings suggests that unexpected outcomes gives rise to myriad social inferences across the life span.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We did not test children younger than age 5 because we thought they would struggle to understand the diagrams used to convey social relations. However, younger children might infer relations from mutual connections if these were presented in a different way, since infants and toddlers make statistical social inferences(Diesendruck et al, 2015;Kushnir et al, 2010;Ma & Xu, 2011;Vélez & Gweon, 2020;Wu & Gweon, 2021).2 We accidentally overlooked this exclusion criterion when preregistering this experiment. The pattern of results does not change if these seven participants are included.INFERRING RELATIONSHIPS…”

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confidence: 99%

The social network: How people infer relationships from mutual connections.

Sehl¹,

Friedman²

2023

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

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People infer that individuals are socially related if they have overlapping preferences, beliefs, and choices. Here we examined whether people also infer relationships by attending to social network information. In five preregistered experiments, participants were shown the social networks of two target people and their friends or acquaintances within a group, and judged if the targets were socially related to one another. In the first three experiments, adults (total N = 528) were more likely to judge that individuals were friends when a high rather than low proportion of their friendships were mutual. Adults also considered other factors when inferring friendships, such as the number of friends each individual had. In the final two experiments, 5–7-year-olds (total N = 135) were also sensitive to the proportion of mutual relationships. Together, our work suggests that people use proportional information and statistical inferences when assessing whether individuals are socially related.

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Preschool‐Aged Children Jointly Consider Others’ Emotional Expressions and Prior Knowledge to Decide When to Explore

Abstract: Preschool-aged children jointly consider others' emotional expressions and prior knowledge to decide when to explore. Child Development. Online first publication.

Cited by 17 publications

References 61 publications

Play in predictive minds: A cognitive theory of play.

Play in predictive minds: A cognitive theory of play.

Emotion as Information in Early Social Learning

The social network: How people infer relationships from mutual connections.

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