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Piaget's Stage 1 of Cognitive Development

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Related Experiment Video

Updated: May 31, 2025

Gaze in Action: Head-mounted Eye Tracking of Children's Dynamic Visual Attention During Naturalistic Behavior

Gaze in Action: Head-mounted Eye Tracking of Children's Dynamic Visual Attention During Naturalistic Behavior

Published on: November 14, 2018

Emotional Movement Kinematics Guide Twelve-Month-Olds' Visual, but Not Manual, Exploration.

Joanna M Rutkowska^1,2, Julia Mermier³, Marlene Meyer¹

¹Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.

Infancy : the Official Journal of the International Society on Infant Studies

|January 22, 2025

Summary

Twelve-month-old infants preferred looking at toys moved with positive emotions. However, they did not show a preference for touching or exploring these toys, suggesting early emotional understanding of movement is complex.

Keywords:

emotion emotion processing exploration kinematics movement

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Last Updated: May 31, 2025

Gaze in Action: Head-mounted Eye Tracking of Children's Dynamic Visual Attention During Naturalistic Behavior

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Published on: November 14, 2018

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Published on: October 5, 2018

A Method to Quantify Visual Information Processing in Children Using Eye Tracking

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Published on: July 9, 2016

Area of Science:

Developmental Psychology
Social Cognition
Infant Behavior

Background:

Recognizing emotions through movement kinematics is vital for social interaction and learning.
Infants are sensitive to emotions conveyed by movement, but their association with objects is unclear.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate if 12-month-old infants associate objects with emotions conveyed through movement kinematics.
To determine if infants use this emotional information to guide their object exploration.

Main Methods:

Infants observed actors transporting toys with positive or negative emotional valence.
Infants were subsequently given the opportunity to interact with the same toys.

Main Results:

Infants looked longer at toys handled with positive emotional valence compared to negative.
No significant difference was found in the duration infants touched either toy.
There was no difference in which toy infants explored first manually.

Conclusions:

Infants demonstrate an early ability to differentiate objects based on the emotional valence of their movement.
While visual attention is influenced by perceived emotion in movement, this does not directly translate to preferential physical interaction or exploration in 12-month-olds.