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Updated: Jun 12, 2025

Experience is Instrumental in Tuning a Link Between Language and Cognition: Evidence from 6- to 7- Month-Old Infants' Object Categorization
Published on: April 19, 2017
11-month-olds recognize the teacher-student relationship
Ruolan Ling1, Reiko Matsunaka2, Kazuo Hiraki3
1Department of General System Studies, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, 153-8902, Japan. lingruolan@g.ecc.u-tokyo.ac.jp.
Abstract:
Understanding how preverbal infants perceive and differentiate the roles of teachers and students can provide profound insights into the early stages of human learning and cognition. We thus developed a paradigm based on the task order and the interactive position to determine if infants understand teacher-student relationships. Five experiments (N = 104), reveal that, after watching the teacher agent instruct the student agent from failure to success, 11-month-old infants looked at the teacher for a longer time when they watched a new naïve agent seek information in a new ambiguous scenario. Three additional control experiments excluded alternative interpretations of infants' selective looking, suggesting that agents' order-related actions influenced infants' identification. Another control experiment demonstrated the importance of the position when the teacher and the student had interactive exchanges. These findings indicate that preverbal infants can recognize the teacher-student relationship, which is crucial to accessing effective information in early life.
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