Understanding preferences in infancy

Abstract

A preference is defined as a dispositional state that helps explain why a person chooses one option over another. Preference understanding is a significant part of interpreting and predicting others' behavior, which can also help to guide social encounters, for instance, to initiate interactions and even form relationships based on shared preferences. Cognitive developmental research in the past several decades has revealed that infants have relatively sophisticated understandings about others' preferences, as part of investigations into how young children make sense of others' behavior in terms of mental states such as intentions, dispositions including preferences, and epistemic states. In recent years, research on early psychological knowledge expands to including infant understanding of social situations. As such, infants are also found to use their preference understandings in their social life. They treat favorably others who share their own preferences, and they prefer prosocial and similar others (e.g., those who speak their language). In reviewing these results, we point out future directions for research and conclude with further suggestions and recommendations.

Toddlers Prefer Agents Who Help Those Facing Harder Tasks

“…We build upon a body of experiments that have found that infants and toddlers show an early capacity for social evaluation: They preferentially look to and reach for agents who help others over agents who hinder others in the pursuit of their goals (Choi & Luo, 2023 ; Hamlin & Wynn, 2011 ; Hamlin et al, 2007 , 2010 ; Hamlin, Ullman, et al, 2013 ; Margoni & Surian, 2018 ; Schlingloff et al, 2020 ; Woo et al, 2022 ). Although there have been failures to replicate these findings (Salvadori et al, 2015 ; Schlingloff et al, 2020 ), a meta-analysis of experiments probing early social evaluations has found that infants and toddlers demonstrate a significant preference for helpers over hinderers (Margoni & Surian, 2018 ).…”