Infants use attention but not emotions to predict others' actions

Phillips et al. (2002) suggest that by 12-14 months, infants can use a person's emotional and attentional cues to predict that person's actions. However, this work was conducted using only positive emotions, which is problematic because attention and positive emotions lead to the same prediction about a person's actions, thus leaving unclear whether infants made predictions based upon attention and emotion or attention alone. To get around this problem, we used both positive and negative emotions in a looking-time paradigm to investigate whether 14-month-old infants can use emotional cues to predict a person's actions. The findings suggest that infants used attentional but not emotional cues as predictors. We argue that while 14-month-olds can use another person's emotion cues to modify their own behavior (as in social referencing situations), they do not yet use them robustly to predict the other's behavior.