Do dogs preferentially encode the identity of the target object or the location of others' actions?

The ability to make sense of and predict others' actions is foundational for many socio-cognitive abilities. Dogs (Canis familiaris) constitute interesting comparative models for the study of action perception due to their marked sensitivity to human actions. We tested companion dogs (N = 21) in two screen-based eye-tracking experiments, adopting a task previously used with human infants and apes, to assess which aspects of an agent's action dogs consider relevant to the agent's underlying intentions. An agent was shown repeatedly acting upon the same one of two objects, positioned in the same location. We then presented the objects in swapped locations and the agent approached the objects centrally (Experiment 1) or the old object in the new location or the new object in the old location (Experiment 2). Dogs' anticipatory fixations and looking times did not reflect an expectation that agents should have continued approaching the same object nor the same location as witnessed during the brief familiarization phase; this contrasts with some findings with infants and apes, but aligns with findings in younger infants before they have sufficient motor experience with the observed action. However, dogs' pupil dilation and latency to make an anticipatory fixation suggested that, if anything, dogs expected the agents to keep approaching the same location rather than the same object, and their looking times showed sensitivity to the animacy of the agents. We conclude that dogs, lacking motor experience with the observed actions of grasping or kicking performed by a human or inanimate agent, might interpret such actions as directed toward a specific location rather than a specific object. Future research will need to further probe the suitability of anticipatory looking as measure of dogs' socio-cognitive abilities given differences between the visual systems of dogs and primates.

Preverbal infants' understanding of social norms.

Social norms are foundational to human cooperation and co-existence in social groups. A crucial marker of social norms is that a behavior is not only shared, but that the conformity to the behavior of others is a basis for social evaluation (i.e., reinforcement and sanctioning), taking the is, how individuals usually behave, to an ought, how individuals should behave to be socially approved by others. In this preregistered study, we show that 11-month-old infants grasp this fundamental aspect about social norms already in their first year. They showed a pupillary surprise response for unexpected social responses, namely the disapproval and exclusion of an individual who showed the same behavior like others or the approval and inclusion of an individual who behaved differently. That preverbal infants link the conformity with others' behavior to social evaluations, before they respond to norm violations themselves, indicates that the foundations of social norm understanding lie in early infancy.

The pupil collaboration: A multi-lab, multi-method analysis of goal attribution in infants.

The rise of pupillometry in infant research over the last decade is associated with a variety of methods for data preprocessing and analysis. Although pupil diameter is increasingly recognized as an alternative measure of the popular cumulative looking time approach used in many studies (Jackson & Sirois, 2022), an open question is whether the many approaches used to analyse this variable converge. To this end, we proposed a crowdsourced approach to pupillometry analysis. A dataset from 30 9-month-old infants (15 girls; Mage = 282.9 days, SD = 8.10) was provided to 7 distinct teams for analysis. The data were obtained from infants watching video sequences showing a hand, initially resting between two toys, grabbing one of them (after Woodward, 1998). After habituation, infants were shown (in random order) a sequence of four test events that varied target position and target toy. Results show that looking times reflect primarily the familiar path of the hand, regardless of target toy. Gaze data similarly show this familiarity effect of path. The pupil dilation analyses show that features of pupil baseline measures (duration and temporal location) as well as data retention variation (trial and/or participant) due to different inclusion criteria from the various analysis methods are linked to divergences in findings. Two of the seven teams found no significant findings, whereas the remaining five teams differ in the pattern of findings for main and interaction effects. The discussion proposes guidelines for best practice in the analysis of pupillometry data.

Approach-avoidance orientations can predict young children's decision-making.

When facing situations that involve risk and reward, some may focus on the opportunity for reward, whereas others may focus on potential risks. Here, we used an original set of pictorial scenarios to try and predict 3- to 8-year-olds' reward-seeking and risk-avoiding behavior in three decision-making scenarios (N = 99; Mage = 5.6; 47% girls). We found that children's reward-risk tendencies did not predict sharing behavior in a dictator-game 'sharing' task. However, they predicted children's monopolizing behavior in a dictator-game 'taking' task and their preferences between taking home a 'risky' or a 'safe' reward in a novel prize-preference task. Overall, using a set of original pictorial scenarios to assess individual differences early on in development now provides initial evidence that bridges individual differences and decision-making domains and exposes behavioral patterns that were thus far hidden.

How "peer-fear" of others' evaluations can regulate young children's cooperation.

Children's cooperation with peers undergoes substantial developmental changes between 3 and 10 years of age. Here we stipulate that young children's initial fearfulness of peers' behaviour develops into older children's fearfulness of peers' evaluations of their own behaviour. Cooperation may constitute an adaptive environment in which the expressions of fear and self-conscious emotions regulate the quality of children's peer relationships.

Children's affective involvement in early word learning.

The current study set out to examine the underlying physiological mechanisms of and the emotional response associated with word learning success in young 3-year-old predominantly white children. In particular, we examined whether children's physiological arousal following a word learning task predicts their word learning success and whether successful learning in turn predicts children's subsequent positive emotions. We presented children (n = 50) with a cross-situational word learning task and measured their pupillary arousal following completion of the task, as well as changes to their upper body posture following completion of the task, as indices of children's emotions following task completion. Children who showed greater physiological arousal following the novel word recognition task (n = 40) showed improved subsequent word recognition performance. We found that children showed more elevated posture after completing a familiar word learning task compared to completing a novel word learning task (n = 33) but results on children's individual learning success and postural elevation were mixed. We discuss the findings with regards to children's affective involvement in word learning.

Evidence for a developmental shift in the motivation underlying helping in early childhood.

We investigated children's positive emotions as an indicator of their underlying prosocial motivation. In Study 1, 2-, and 5-year-old children (N = 64) could either help an individual or watch as another person provided help. Following the helping event and using depth sensor imaging, we measured children's positive emotions through changes in postural elevation. For 2-year-olds, helping the individual and watching another person help was equally rewarding; 5-year-olds showed greater postural elevation after actively helping. In Study 2, 5-year-olds' (N = 59) positive emotions following helping were greater when an audience was watching. Together, these results suggest that 2-year-old children have an intrinsic concern that individuals be helped whereas 5-year-old children have an additional, strategic motivation to improve their reputation by helping.

The ontogeny of children's social emotions in response to (un)fairness.

Humans have a deeply rooted sense of fairness, but its emotional foundation in early ontogeny remains poorly understood. Here, we asked if and when 4- to 10-year-old children show negative social emotions, such as shame or guilt, in response to advantageous unfairness expressed through a lowered body posture (measured using a Kinect depth sensor imaging camera). We found that older, but not younger children, showed more negative emotions, i.e. a reduced upper body posture, after unintentionally disadvantaging a peer on (4,1) trials than in response to fair (1,1) outcomes between themselves and others. Younger children, in contrast, expressed more negative emotions in response to the fair (1,1) split than in response to advantageous inequity. No systematic pattern of children's emotional responses was found in a non-social context, in which children divided resources between themselves and a non-social container. Supporting individual difference analyses showed that older children in the social context expressed negative emotions in response to advantageous inequity without directly acting on this negative emotional response by rejecting an advantageously unfair offer proposed by an experimenter at the end of the study. These findings shed new light on the emotional foundation of the human sense of fairness and suggest that children's negative emotional response to advantageous unfairness developmentally precedes their rejection of advantageously unfair resource distributions.

Processing third-party social interactions in the human infant brain.

The understanding of developing social brain functions during infancy relies on research that has focused on studying how infants engage in first-person social interactions or view individual agents and their actions. Behavioral research suggests that observing and learning from third-party social interactions plays a foundational role in early social and moral development. However, the brain systems involved in observing third-party social interactions during infancy are unknown. The current study tested the hypothesis that brain systems in prefrontal and temporal cortex, previously identified in adults and children, begin to specialize in third-party social interaction processing during infancy. Infants (N = 62), ranging from 6 to 13 months in age, had their brain responses measured using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) while viewing third-party social interactions and two control conditions, infants viewing two individual actions and infants viewing inverted social interactions. The results show that infants preferentially engage brain regions localized within the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex when viewing third-party social interactions. These findings suggest that brain systems processing third-party social interaction begin to develop early in human ontogeny and may thus play a foundational role in supporting the interpretation of and learning from social interactions.

Young children show negative emotions after failing to help others.

Self-conscious emotions, such as guilt and shame, motivate the adherence to social norms, including to norms for prosociality. The relevance of an observing audience to the expression of negative self-conscious emotions remains poorly understood. Here, in two studies, we investigated the influence of being observed on 4- to 5-year-old children's (N = 161) emotional response after failing to help someone in need and after failing to complete their own goal. As an index of children's emotional response, we recorded the change in children's upper body posture using a motion depth sensor imaging camera. Failing to help others lowered children's upper body posture regardless of whether children were observed by an audience or not. Children's emotional response was similar when they failed to help and when they failed to complete their own goal. In Study 2, 5-year-olds showed a greater decrease in upper body posture than 4-year-olds. Our findings suggest that being observed is not a necessary condition for young children to express a negative self-conscious emotion after failing to help or after failing to complete their own goal. We conclude that 5-year-olds, more so that 4-year-olds, show negative emotions when they fail to adhere to social norms for prosociality.

Preschool children's evaluations of their own unjustified requests.

To make a fair request, requesters should consider the perspective of the requestee and contrast his or her needs with their own needs. Making an unjustified request (e.g., requesting something we do not need but the requestee does need) can induce some negative feelings such as guilt. Here, we investigated whether making unjustified requests resulted in negative emotions in 3- and 5-year-old children. Participants (N = 83; 34 girls) requested resources that they did or did not need from an experimenter who either did or did not need them. Both age groups were slower and more hesitant to make an unjustified request (children did not need the sticker, but the experimenter did) and also showed lowered body posture when making an unjustified request compared with when making a justified request (children needed the sticker, but the experimenter did not). Three-year-olds showed more pronounced changes in their posture, whereas 5-year-olds' emotional expression was overall more blunted. Rather, older children relied more on verbal indirect utterances (e.g., "You've got lovely stickers"), as opposed to direct requests (e.g., "Can I have that sticker?"), when making unjustified requests. These results suggest that preschool children already apply impartial normative standards to their requests for help, account for the fairness of their requests, and consider the needs of others when requesting.

Differences in cognitive processing? The role of verbal processes and mental effort in bilingual and monolingual children's planning performance.

Past research documents a bilingual advantage in the domain of executive functions (EFs). However, controversial debates have questioned the robustness of those behavioral differences. The current study aimed to better understand the underlying cognitive prerequisites in bilingual students as compared with monolingual students and focused on two processes: the role of verbal processes, on the one hand, and mental effort during task execution, on the other. The use of self-regulatory speech has been found to be related to performance in tasks requiring EFs. For bilinguals who have grown up with two language systems from an early age, those relations are not fully understood. Furthermore, results from neuroimaging studies have shown that bilinguals might exhibit less mental effort in EF tasks. We investigated both processes in German-speaking monolingual elementary school students (n = 33; Mage = 8.78 years) and German-Russian bilingual elementary school students (n = 34; Mage = 8.88 years) solving a planning task. Results showed that monolinguals were impaired by a verbal secondary task in comparison with a motor control condition, whereas bilinguals performed in both tasks at an equal level, indicating a differential role of self-regulatory speech in both language groups. Analyses of changes in pupil diameter revealed less mental effort during task execution for bilingual children as compared with monolingual children. The current study adds to the existing literature by supplying further evidence for cognitive differences between monolingual and bilingual children.

Observing others' joint attention increases 9-month-old infants' object encoding.

In direct interactions with others, 9-month-old infants' learning about objects is facilitated when the interaction partner addresses the infant through eye contact before looking toward an object. In this study we investigated whether similar factors promote infants' observational learning from third-party interactions. In Experiment 1, 9-month-old typically developing infants from mixed socioeconomic backgrounds from urban Germany (N = 32, 13 female) were presented with four types of videos showing one object and two adults. The scenarios varied systematically regarding the eye contact between the adults (eye contact or no eye contact), and the adults' object-directed gaze (looking toward or away from the object). To assess infants' encoding performance we measured their looking times when seeing the familiarized object subsequently next to a novel object, interpreting an enhanced novelty preference as reversely indicating greater encoding of the familiarized object. Infants showed an increased novelty preference, but only after observing a joint attentional setting during which two adults attended to the familiarized object together (following eye contact). In Experiment 2, we found an identical pattern of results in a matched first-party design in which 9-month-old infants (N = 32, 16 female) were directly addressed by one single adult on screen. Infants' encoding was only enhanced when the adult made eye contact with the infant before looking at an object. Together, this suggests that the capacity to learn through observing others' interactions emerges already in the first postnatal year, and that it may depend on similar factors as infants' learning through direct social engagement. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Infants' Preference for Social Interactions Increases from 7 to 13 Months of Age.

This study examined 7-to-13.5-month-old middle-class Western infants' visual orienting to third-party interactions in parallel with their social attention behavior during own social interactions (Leipzig, Germany). In Experiment 1, 9.5- to-11-month-olds (n = 20) looked longer than 7- to-8.5-month-olds (n = 20) at videos showing two adults interacting with one another when simultaneously presented with a scene showing two adults acting individually. Moreover, older infants showed higher social engagement (including joint attention) during parent-infant free play. Experiment 2 replicated this age-related increase in both measures and showed that it follows continuous trajectories from 7 to 13.5 months (n = 50). This suggests that infants' attentional orienting to others' interactions coincides with parallel developments in their social attention behavior during own social interactions.

Cultural values shape the expression of self-evaluative social emotions.

Social emotions are key to everyday social life and therefore shaped by cultural values in their expression. Prior research has focused on facial expressions of emotions. What is less clear, however, is the extent to which cultural values shape other modalities of emotional expression. In the present study, we applied a novel paradigm using depth sensor imaging technology to capture changes in participants' body posture in real time. We aimed to (1) identify the nuances in the postural expression that are thought to characterize social emotions and (2) assess how individual differences in cultural values impact the postural expression of emotions. Participants in two separate studies were 132 undergraduate college students whose upper-body postural expansion was recorded after they recalled emotion episodes. Positive emotions elevated participants' upper-body posture whereas negative emotions resulted in lowered upper-body posture. The effects on changes in upper-body posture were moderated by participants' self-ratings of the vertical and horizontal dimensions of individualism and collectivism. The findings provide initial evidence of the nuances in the way cultural values influence the postural expression of emotions.

Young children share more under time pressure than after a delay.

Adults under time pressure share with others generously, but with more time they act more selfishly. In the current study, we investigated whether young children already operate in this same way, and, if so, whether this changes over the preschool and early school age years. We tested 144 children in three age groups (3-, 5-, and 7-year olds) in a one-shot dictator game: Children were given nine stickers and had the possibility to share stickers with another child who was absent. Children in the Time Pressure condition were instructed to share quickly, whereas children in the Delay condition were instructed to take time and consider their decision carefully. Across ages, children in the Time Pressure condition shared significantly more stickers than children in the Delay condition. Moreover, the longer children waited, the less they shared. Thus, children, like adults, are more prosocial when acting spontaneously than after considering their decision more carefully.

Social interaction targets enhance 13-month-old infants' associative learning.

Infants are attentive to third-party interactions, but the underlying mechanisms of this preference remain understudied. This study examined whether 13-month-old infants (N = 32) selectively learn cue-target associations guiding them to videos depicting a social interaction scene. In a visual learning task, two geometrical shapes were repeatedly paired with two kinds of target videos: two adults interacting with one another (social interaction) or the same adults acting individually (non-interactive control). Infants performed faster saccadic latencies and more predictive gaze shifts toward the cued target region during social interaction trials. These findings suggest that social interaction targets can serve as primary reinforcers in an associative learning task, supporting the view that infants find it intrinsically valuable to observe others' interactions.

Toddlers Prefer Adults as Informants: 2- and 3-Year-Olds' Use of and Attention to Pointing Gestures From Peer and Adult Partners.

Two- and 3-year-old children (N = 96) were tested in an object-choice task with video presentations of peer and adult partners. An immersive, semi-interactive procedure enabled both the close matching of adult and peer conditions and the combination of participants' choice behavior with looking time measures. Children were more likely to use information provided by adults. As the effect was more pronounced in the younger age-group, the observed bias may fade during toddlerhood. As there were no differences in children's propensity to follow peer and adult gestures with their gaze, these findings provide some of the earliest evidence to date that young children take an interlocutor's age into account when judging ostensively communicated testimony.

Chimpanzees' (Pan troglodytes) internal arousal remains elevated if they cannot themselves help a conspecific.

Chimpanzees help conspecifics achieve their goals in instrumental situations, but neither their immediate motivation nor the evolutionary basis of their motivation is clear. In the current study, we gave chimpanzees the opportunity to instrumentally help a conspecific to obtain food. Following recent studies with human children, we measured their pupil diameter at various points in the process. Like young children, chimpanzees' pupil diameter decreased soon after they had helped. However, unlike children, chimpanzees' pupils remained more dilated upon watching a third party provide the needed help instead of them. Our interpretation is that chimpanzees are motivated to help others, and the evolutionary basis is direct or indirect reciprocity, as providing help oneself sets the conditions for a payback. This is in contrast to young children whose goal is to see others being helped-by whomever-presumably because their helping is not based on reciprocity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Cultural variation in young children's social motivation for peer collaboration and its relation to the ontogeny of Theory of Mind.

Children seek and like to engage in collaborative activities with their peers. This social motivation is hypothesized to facilitate their emerging social-cognitive skills and vice versa. Current evidence on the ontogeny of social motivation and its' links to social cognition, however, is subject to a sampling bias toward participants from urban Western populations. Here, we show both cross-cultural variation and homogeneity in three- to eight-year-old children's expressed positive emotions during and explicit preferences for peer collaboration across three diverse populations (urban German, rural Hai||om/Namibia, rural Ovambo/Namibia; n = 240). Children expressed more positive emotions during collaboration as compared to individual activity, but the extent varied across populations. Children's preferences for collaboration differed markedly between populations and across ages: While German children across all ages sought collaboration, Hai||om children preferred to act individually throughout childhood. Ovambo children preferred individual play increasingly with age. Across populations, positive emotions expressed selectively during collaboration, predicted children's social-cognitive skills. These findings provide evidence that culture shapes young children's social motivation for dyadic peer collaboration. At the same time, the positive relation of social motivation and social cognition in early ontogeny appears cross-culturally constant.