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Infants use attention but not emotions to predict others' actions

Amrisha Vaish1, Amanda Woodward

  • 1Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Deutscher Platz 6, 04103 Leipzig, Germany. vaish@eva.mpg.de

Infant Behavior & Development
|December 25, 2009
PubMed

Insights

Infants at 14 months use attentional cues, not emotional cues, to predict actions. While they can use emotions for social referencing, they don't yet predict behavior based on them.

Area of Science:

  • Developmental psychology
  • Infant cognition
  • Social cognition

Background:

  • Previous research indicated 12-14 month olds use emotional and attentional cues to predict actions.
  • Prior studies used only positive emotions, conflating attention and emotion effects.
  • The role of emotional cues in action prediction remained unclear.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate if 14-month-old infants use emotional cues to predict a person's actions.
  • To differentiate the predictive power of emotional versus attentional cues.
  • To clarify the developmental trajectory of using emotional cues for action prediction.

Main Methods:

  • A looking-time paradigm was employed with 14-month-old infants.
  • Both positive and negative emotional cues were presented.
  • Infants' looking times were measured to infer predictive capabilities.

Main Results:

  • Infants utilized attentional cues to predict actions.
  • Infants did not use emotional cues as predictors of actions.
  • Findings suggest a developmental lag in using emotion for action prediction.

Conclusions:

  • 14-month-olds do not robustly predict others' actions using emotional cues.
  • Infants can use emotional cues for social referencing, but not yet for action prediction.
  • This highlights a specific developmental milestone in social cognition.

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