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Updated: Dec 26, 2025
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A Within-subjects Experimental Protocol to Assess the Effects of Social Input on Infant EEG
Published on: May 3, 2017
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Efficiency as a principle for social preferences in infancy.
Marc Colomer1, Jesus Bas1, Nuria Sebastian-Galles1
1Center for Brain and Cognition (CBC), Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 08005 Barcelona, Spain.
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
|March 11, 2020
Summary
Infants prefer observing efficient agents and expect others to do the same. This study shows 15-month-olds
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Science
- Developmental Psychology
- Social Cognition
Background:
- Infants demonstrate expectations of efficient goal-directed actions.
- Infants exhibit selective social navigation, forming preferences and attributing them to others.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate how the expectation of action efficiency influences infants' looking preferences.
- To examine how infants infer others' preferences based on observed action efficiency.
Main Methods:
- 15-month-old infants were presented with videos of three geometric social agents.
- One agent (observer) watched two other agents pursue a reward via efficient or inefficient paths.
- Infants' looking time and tracking of agent actions were measured in third-party scenarios.
Main Results:
- Infants looked longer when the observer agent approached the inefficient agent.
- Infants preferentially tracked the actions of the efficient agent when both acted simultaneously.
- Experiment 2 ruled out differences in movement repertoire as an explanation for these findings.
Conclusions:
- The principle of efficiency guides infants' attention and expectations in social scenarios.
- Infants show surprise when a third agent interacts with an agent who previously acted inefficiently.
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