Infants' individuation of human faces across race and identity.

Young infants' face perception capabilities quickly tune to the features of their primary caregiver. The current study examines whether infants distinguish faces in a more conceptual manner using a manual-search, violation of expectation task that has previously been used to test kind-based individuation. We tested how well infants between 11 and 27 months of age individuated faces that varied by superordinate category (human vs. non-human in Experiment 1) subordinate category (individual identity in Experiment 2) or by race (White vs. Black, Experiments 1 & 2). We assessed individuation by quantifying the difference in infants' duration of reaching within an empty box between trials when the box was unexpectedly empty and expectedly empty. We found evidence of individuation across all ages and conditions, but with within-infant variation. On average, infants individuated face from non-face stimuli (Experiment 1), individual face identities (Experiment 2), and White versus Black faces (Experiments 1 & 2). These findings suggest that 1- to 2-year-old infants use distinct human face features to represent individuals across time and space. We discuss this evidence for race-based individuation and related complexities of face identity in terms of implications for conceptual development for faces in the first years of life.

What gaze direction can tell us about cognitive processes in invertebrates.

Most visually guided animals shift their gaze using body movements, eye movements, or both to gather information selectively from their environments. Psychological studies of eye movements have advanced our understanding of perceptual and cognitive processes that mediate visual attention in humans and other vertebrates. However, much less is known about how these processes operate in other organisms, particularly invertebrates. We here make the case that studies of invertebrate cognition can benefit by adding precise measures of gaze direction. To accomplish this, we briefly review the human visual attention literature and outline four research themes and several experimental paradigms that could be extended to invertebrates. We briefly review selected studies where the measurement of gaze direction in invertebrates has provided new insights, and we suggest future areas of exploration.

Looking smart: Preschoolers' judgements about knowledge based on facial appearance.

Preschoolers use others' behaviours to make inferences about what traits they possess (Harris et al., 2018, Ann. Rev. Psychol., 69, 251). The current study examined whether 4- and 5-year-olds also associate others' behaviour with how they appear on the surface. Specifically, we asked whether children's sensitivity to different face-traits (e.g., Cogsdill et al., 2014, Psychol. Sci., 25, 1132) would bias them to associate knowledgeable behaviours with faces that adults rate as highly competent- or trustworthy-looking. We find that preschoolers expect puppets with trustworthy-looking faces to be knowledgeable about the functions of familiar objects. In contrast, children did not match a puppet's knowledge to facial features that adults rate as varying in competence. These data suggest that children, like adults, are biased to associate facial appearance and behaviour. Furthermore, this bias appears to be rooted in a response to the same facial features that have been found to govern judgements of trustworthiness across development (e.g., Jessen & Grossmann, 2016, J. Cogn. Neurosci., 28, 1728). Statement of contribution What is already known on this subject? Preschoolers selectively trust others using epistemic and non-epistemic cues (Harris et al., 2018). Preschoolers associate specific faces with trustworthiness and competence (Cogsdill et al., 2014). What the present study adds? Preschoolers infer that trustworthy-looking characters will behave knowledgeably. Preschoolers do not infer that competent-looking characters will behave knowledgeably. Children's reliability judgements are influenced by others' appearance.

Infants' Individuation of Faces by Gender.

By 3 months of age, infants can perceptually distinguish faces based upon differences in gender. However, it is still unknown when infants begin using these perceptual differences to represent faces in a conceptual, kind-based manner. The current study examined this issue by using a violation-of-expectation manual search individuation paradigm to assess 12- and 24-month-old infants' kind-based representations of faces varying by gender. While infants of both ages successfully individuated human faces from non-face shapes in a control condition, only the 24-month-old infants' reaching behaviors provided evidence of their individuating male from female faces. The current findings help specify when infants begin to represent male and female faces as being conceptually distinct and may serve as a starting point for socio-cognitive biases observed later in development.

Examining Infants' Individuation of Others by Sociomoral Disposition.

Early on infants seem to represent social actions of others from a moral perspective, evaluating others' dispositions as "mean" or "nice." The current research examined whether or not 11-month-old infants represent these sociomoral dispositions as deep and identity-determining properties using an object individuation task. Infants were shown two identical looking characters emerging sequentially from behind a screen and engaging in two different sociomoral actions. By using a looking-time paradigm the results show an interaction effect between the baseline and test trials, showing that infants seem to represent two different characters involved in the event, disregarding their same external appearance. This effect was mainly apparent when infants witnessed a negative event first in test trials. Experiments 2 and 3 control for alternative explanations. In Experiment 2 infants failed to individuate two characters when they are shown two identical looking puppets. In Experiment 3 infants fail to represent two characters when social information was taken away from the show. We discuss the possibility that by the end of the first year of life infants might represent sociomoral dispositions as diagnostic of individual identity.

"Incentive hope" and the nature of impulsivity in low-socioeconomic-status individuals.

Low-income environments have been associated with greater levels of impulsive behavior, which contribute to the higher debt and obesity rates that further perpetuate current wealth and health disparities. In this commentary, we describe how this might be explained by an appeal to "incentive hope" and the motivational drive toward consumption triggered by the future uncertainty these groups face.

Infants' agent individuation: It's what's on the insides that counts.

Adults and preschool-aged children believe that internal properties are more important than external properties when determining an agent's identity over time. The current study examined the developmental origins of this understanding using a manual-search individuation task with 13-month-old infants. Subjects observed semi-transparent objects that looked and behaved like animate agents placed into box that they could reach but not see into. Across trials infants observed objects with either the same- or different-colored insides placed into the box. We found that infants used internal property differences more than external property differences to determine how many agents were involved in the event. A second experiment confirmed that this effect was specific to the domain of animate entities. These results suggest that infants are biased to see an agent's 'insides' as more important for determining its identity over time than its outside properties.

Developmental Origins of Biological Explanations: The case of infants' internal property bias.

People's explanations about the biological world are heavily biased toward internal, non-obvious properties. Adults and children as young as 5 years of age find internal properties more causally central than external features for explaining general biological processes and category membership. In this paper, we describe how this 'internal property bias' may be grounded in two different developmental precursors observed in studies with infants: (1) an early understanding of biological agency that is apparent in infants' reasoning about animals, and (2) the acquisition of kind-based representations that distinguish between essential and accidental properties, spanning from animals to artifacts. We argue that these precursors may support the progressive construction of the notion of biological kinds and explanations during childhood. Shortly after their first year of life, infants seem to represent the internal properties of animates as more central and identity-determining that external properties. Over time, this skeletal notion of biological kinds is integrated into diverse explanations about kind membership and biological processes, with an increasingly better understanding of the causal role of internal properties.

Data from a pre-publication independent replication initiative examining ten moral judgement effects.

We present the data from a crowdsourced project seeking to replicate findings in independent laboratories before (rather than after) they are published. In this Pre-Publication Independent Replication (PPIR) initiative, 25 research groups attempted to replicate 10 moral judgment effects from a single laboratory's research pipeline of unpublished findings. The 10 effects were investigated using online/lab surveys containing psychological manipulations (vignettes) followed by questionnaires. Results revealed a mix of reliable, unreliable, and culturally moderated findings. Unlike any previous replication project, this dataset includes the data from not only the replications but also from the original studies, creating a unique corpus that researchers can use to better understand reproducibility and irreproducibility in science.

Cohesion as a constraint on object persistence in infancy.

A critical challenge for visual perception is to represent objects as the same persisting individuals over time and motion. Across several areas of cognitive science, researchers have identified cohesion as among the most important theoretical principles of object persistence: An object must maintain a single bounded contour over time. Drawing inspiration from recent work in adult visual cognition, the present study tested the power of cohesion as a constraint as it operates early in development. In particular, we tested whether the most minimal cohesion violation - a single object splitting into two - would destroy infants' ability to represent a quantity of objects over occlusion. In a forced-choice crawling paradigm, 10- and 12-month-old infants witnessed crackers being sequentially placed into containers, and typically crawled toward the container with the greater cracker quantity. When one of the crackers was visibly split in half, however, infants failed to represent the relative quantities, despite controls for the overall quantities and the motions involved. This result helps to characterize the fidelity and specificity of cohesion as a fundamental principle of object persistence, suggesting that even the simplest possible cohesion violation can dramatically impair infants' object representations and influence their overt behavior.

Units of visual individuation in rhesus macaques: objects or unbound features?

Vision begins with the processing of unbound visual features, which must eventually be bound together into object representations. Such feature binding is required for coherent visual perception, and accordingly has received a considerable amount of study in several domains. Neurophysiological work, often in monkeys, has revealed the details of how and where feature binding occurs in the brain, but methodological limitations have not allowed this research to elucidate just how feature binding operates spontaneously in real-world situations. In contrast, behavioral work with human infants has demonstrated how we use simpler unbound features to individuate and identify objects over time and occlusion in many types of events, but this work has not typically been able to isolate the role of feature binding in such processing. Here we provide a method for assessing the spontaneity and fidelity of feature binding in non-human primates, as this process is utilized in real-world situations, including simple foraging behaviors. Using both looking-time and manual-search measures in a natural environment, we show that free-ranging rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) spontaneously bind features in order to individuate objects across time and occlusion in dynamic events. This pattern of results demonstrates that feature binding is used in subtle ways to guide ecologically relevant behavior in a non-human animal, spontaneously and reliably, in its natural environment.

Interrupting infants' persisting object representations: an object-based limit?

Making sense of the visual world requires keeping track of objects as the same persisting individuals over time and occlusion. Here we implement a new paradigm using 10-month-old infants to explore the processes and representations that support this ability in two ways. First, we demonstrate that persisting object representations can be maintained over brief interruptions from additional independent events - just as a memory of a traffic scene may be maintained through a brief glance in the rearview mirror. Second, we demonstrate that this ability is nevertheless subject to an object-based limit: if an interrupting event involves enough objects (carefully controlling for overall salience), then it will impair the maintenance of other persisting object representations even though it is an independent event. These experiments demonstrate how object representations can be studied via their 'interruptibility', and the results are consistent with the idea that infants' persisting object representations are constructed and maintained by capacity-limited mid-level 'object-files'.