This article discusses how the results of infant research challenge the assumptions of the classical sciences of social behaviour. According to A.J. Bergesen, the findings of infant research invalidate Durkheim's theory of mental categories, thus requiring a re-theorizing of sociology. This article argues that Bergesen's reading of Emile Durkheim is incorrect, and his review of the infant research in fact invalidates his argument. Reviewing the assumptions of sociology in the light of the findings of infant research, (...) it is argued that the real challenge is to formulate a research strategy that combines the findings of the two sciences. (shrink)

Children’s cognitive and language development is a central aspect of human development and has wide and long-standing impact. The parent-infant relationship is the chief arena for the infant to learn about the world. Studies reveal associations between quality of parental care and children’s cognitive and language development when the former is measured as maternal sensitivity. Nonetheless, the extent to which parental mentalizing – a parent’s understanding of the thoughts, feelings, and attitudes of a child, and presumed to underlie (...) sensitivity – contributes to children’s cognitive development and functioning, has yet to be thoroughly investigated. According to the epistemic trust theory, high mentalizing parents often use ostensive cues, which signal to the infant that they are perceived and treated as unique subjective beings. By doing so, parents foster epistemic trust in their infants, allowing the infant to use the parents a reliable source of knowledge to learn from. Until recently, parental mentalizing has been limited to verbal approaches and measurement. This is a substantial limitation of the construct as we know that understanding of intentionality is both non-verbal and verbal. In this investigation we employed both verbal and non-verbal, body-based, approaches to parental mentalizing, to examine whether parental mentalizing in a clinical sample predicts children’s cognitive and language development 12 months later. Findings from a longitudinal intervention study of 39 mothers and their infants revealed that parental embodied mentalizing in infancy significantly predicted language development 12 months later and marginally predicted child cognitive development. Importantly, PEM explained unique variance in the child’s cognitive and linguistic capacities over and above maternal emotional availability, child interactive behavior, parental reflective functioning, depression, ethnicity, education, marital status, and number of other children. The theoretical, empirical, and clinical implications of these findings are discussed. (shrink)

The cognitive revolution in the 1950s and 1960s led researchers to view the human mind--like a computer--as an information-processing system that encodes, represents, and stores information and is constrained by limits on hardware and software. The emergence of new behavioral, computational, and neuroscience methodologies, has deeply expanded psychologists' understanding of the workings of the infant, child, and adult mind. One result is that research has focused on mechanisms of change, over developmental time, in the information-processing mind.In this book, Lisa (...) Oakes, Cara Cashon, Marianella Casasola, and David Rakison bring together the recent findings and theories about the origins and early development of the information-processing mind, and provide insight into the future directions in the study of infant perception and cognition. The contributors represent a wide-range of research areas in the study of infant perception and cognition, who emphasize the use of diverse methodological techniques to address key questions about development. Their chapters demonstrate how the combination of historical perspectives on the information-processing approach to cognition and recent advances in behavioral, computational, and neuroscience approaches to cognition has contributed to our understanding of how abilities ranging from visual attention to face processing to object categorization have developed during infancy. Across this broad range of topics, it is clear that much of our modern understanding of infant perceptual and cognitive development emerges from the foundation of classic information-processing models of development, such as that of Leslie B. Cohen. The recent advances illustrated in this book show how researchers have built on this foundation to uncover the mechanisms that drive developmental change. (shrink)

There is a wealth of data on the perceptual and cognitive capacities of infants strongly supporting early nativistic influences on development. Without considering these initial determinants, constructivist models of development are at best incomplete.

Impaired neurodevelopmental outcome, in particular cognitive impairment, after neonatal hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy is a major concern for parents, clinicians, and society. This study aims to investigate the potential benefits of using advanced quantitative electroencephalography analysis for early prediction of cognitive outcomes, assessed here at 2 years of age. EEG data were recorded within the first week after birth from a cohort of twenty infants with neonatal hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy. A proposed regression framework was based on two different sets of features, namely graph-theoretical (...) features derived from the weighted phase-lag index and entropies metrics represented by sample entropy, permutation entropy, and spectral entropy. Both sets of features were calculated within the noise-assisted multivariate empirical mode decomposition domain. Correlation analysis showed a significant association in the delta band between the proposed features, graph attributes and entropy features from the neonatal EEG data and the cognitive development at age two years. These features were used to train and test the tree ensemble regression models. The highest prediction performance was reached to 14.27 root mean square error, 12.07 mean absolute error, and 0.45 R-squared using the entropy features with a boosted tree regression model. Thus, the results demonstrate that the proposed qEEG features show the state of brain function at an early stage; hence, they could serve as predictive biomarkers of later cognitive impairment, which could facilitate identifying those who might benefit from early targeted intervention. (shrink)

Infant carrying provides an important context for cognitive development and social learning in the first year of life. It enables children to perceive the world from a perspective similar to that of their parents. Lateral carrying provides children with new experiences because it gives them access to a broader range of objects. It also gives them better access to socially significant stimuli and aspects of the environment that are relevant to their parents. Thus, it can significantly contribute to learning (...) about objects and their affordances as well as agents, their actions, and mental states. The paper argues that lateral carrying not only contributes to the development of skills related to the emergr̥ence of shared intentionality but may also play an important role in the development of the understanding of the we-mode and perhaps also in the formation of associations in the mirror neuron system. The final sections of the article offer suggestions for further research. (shrink)

The sensorimotor account of vision proposed by O'Regan & Noë (O&N) challenges the classical view of visual cognition as a process of mentally representing the world. Many infant cognition researchers would probably disagree. I describe the surprising ability of young infants to represent and reason about the physical world, and ask how this capacity can be explained in non-representational terms. As a first step toward answering this question, I suggest that recent models of embodied cognition may (...) help illustrate a way of escaping the representational trap. (shrink)

I review recent evidence that very young, pre-verbal infants attribute belief-like states when anticipating the behavior of others. This evidence is drawn from infant performance on non-verbal false belief tasks. I argue that, contrary to typical interpretations, such evidence does not show that infants attribute belief-like states. Rather, it shows that infants apply an enhanced version of what Gergely ( 2011 ) calls the “teleological stance” to brief bouts of behavior. This requires them to parse behavioral sequences into goals (...) and rationally/informationally-constrained means of achieving them; however, it does not require the attribution of unobservable mental states, like beliefs, that are causally responsible for behavior. (shrink)

The main aim of this paper is to highlight the need to address the conceptual problem of “implicit knowledge” or “implicit cognition” —a notion especially important in the study of the nonverbal minds of animals and infants. We review some uses of the term ‘implicit’ in psychology and allied disciplines,and conclude that conceptual clarification of this notion is not only lacking, but largely avoided and reduced to a methodological problem. We propose that this elusive notion is central in the (...) study not only of animal and infant minds, but also the human adult mind. Some promising approaches in developmental and evolutionary psychology towards innovative conceptualisation of implicit knowledge remain conceptually underdeveloped and in need of reconsideration and re-elaboration. We conclude by suggesting that the challenge of implicit cognition and nonverbal minds will only be solved through a concerted interdisciplinary approach between psychology and other disciplines. (shrink)

This chapter applies the parity principle in discussing “active externalism,” which claims that the mind need not be confined within either the brain or body. Consequently, how one brain or body interacts with other brains and bodies must be explored, together with the problems that may arise out of this interaction. This chapter is not concerned with beliefs and desires as mental states but whether they play a role in controlling behavior. It argues the notion that any course of action (...) considered part of the cognitive process going on inside the brain is still part of the cognitive process no matter where it is being implemented. Divided into two parts, this chapter first establishes some points of reference regarding language and cognition, and then proceeds to an attempt to connect the issues by directly discussing the parity principle. (shrink)

Infants are sensitive to statistics in spoken language that aid word‐form segmentation and immediate mapping to referents. However, it is not clear whether this sensitivity influences the formation and retention of word‐referent mappings across a delay, two real‐world challenges that learners must overcome. We tested how the timing of referent training, relative to familiarization with transitional probabilities (TPs) in speech, impacts English‐learning 23‐month‐olds’ ability to form and retain word‐referent mappings. In Experiment 1, we tested infants’ ability to retain TP information (...) across a 10‐min delay and use it in the service of word learning. Infants successfully mapped high‐TP but not low‐TP words to referents. In Experiment 2, infants readily mapped the same words even when they were unfamiliar. In Experiment 3, high‐ and low‐TP word‐referent mappings were trained immediately after familiarization, and infants readily remembered these associations 10 min later. In sum, although 23‐month‐old infants do not need strong statistics to map word forms to referents immediately, or to remember those mappings across a delay, infants are nevertheless sensitive to these statistics in the speech stream, and they influence mapping after a delay. These findings suggest that, by 23 months of age, sensitivity to statistics in speech may impact infants’ language development by leading word forms with low coherence to be poorly mapped following even a short period of consolidation. (shrink)

Agnieszka Jaworska and Julie Tannenbaum address a central problem confronting efforts to understand moral status: the Problem of Nonparadigm Humans. The authors contend that human infants and cognitively disabled human beings whose capacities are comparable to those of dogs nevertheless have higher moral status. In this discussion, I will first reconstruct the authors’ assumptions and argumentative goals. In the article’s two major sections, I will examine the authors’ reasoning in pursuit of those goals and contend that the chain of argumentation (...) contains several weak links. The discussion will close with brief reflections on how the problem might be addressed. (shrink)

Forms of racial cognition begin early: from about 3 months onwards, many human infants prefer to look at own-race faces over other-race faces. What is not yet fully clear is what the psychological mechanisms are that underlie racial thoughts at this early age, and why these mechanisms evolved. In this paper, we propose answers to these questions. Specifically, we use recent experimental data and evolutionary biological insights to argue that early racial cognition is simply the result of a (...) “facial familiarity mechanism”: a mental structure that leads infants to attend to faces that look similar to familiar faces, and which probably has evolved to track potential caregivers. We further argue that this account can be combined with the major existing treatments of the evolution of racial cognition, which apply to adult humans. The result is a heterogeneous picture of racial thought, according to which early and later racial cognition result from very different psychological mechanisms. (shrink)

Recent research has provided converging evidence, using multiple tasks, of sensitivity to fairness in the second year of life. In contrast, findings in the first year have been mixed, leaving it unclear whether young infants possess an expectation of fairness. The present research examined the possibility that young infants might expect windfall resources to be divided equally between similar recipients, but might demonstrate this expectation only under very simple conditions. In three violation-of-expectation experiments, 9-month-olds (N = 120) expected an experimenter (...) to divide two cookies equally between two animated puppets (1:1), and they detected a violation when she divided them unfairly instead (2:0). The same positive result was obtained whether the experimenter gave the cookies one by one to the puppets (Experiments 1–2) or first separated them onto placemats and then gave each puppet a placemat (Experiment 3). However, a negative result was obtained when four (as opposed to two) cookies were allocated: Infants looked about equally whether they saw a fair (2:2) or an unfair (3:1) distribution (Experiment 3). A final experiment revealed that 4-month-olds (N = 40) also expected an experimenter to distribute two cookies equally between two animated puppets (Experiment 4). Together, these and various control results support two broad conclusions. First, sensitivity to fairness emerges very early in life, consistent with claims that an abstract expectation of fairness is part of the basic structure of human moral cognition. Second, this expectation can at first be observed only under simple conditions, and speculations are offered as to why this might be the case. (shrink)

Looking times and gaze behavior indicate that infants can predict the goal state of an observed simple action event (e.g., object‐directed grasping) already in the first year of life. The present paper mainly focuses on infants’ predictive gaze‐shifts toward the goal of an ongoing action. For this, infants need to generate a forward model of the to‐be‐obtained goal state and to disengage their gaze from the moving agent at a time when information about the action event is still incomplete. By (...) about 6 months of age, infants show goal‐predictive gaze‐shifts, but mainly for familiar actions that they can perform themselves (e.g., grasping) and for familiar agents (e.g., a human hand). Therefore, some theoretical models have highlighted close relations between infants’ ability for action‐goal prediction and their motor development and/or emerging action experience. Recent research indicates that infants can also predict action goals of familiar simple actions performed by non‐human agents (e.g., object‐directed grasping by a mechanical claw) when these agents display agency cues, such as self‐propelled movement, equifinality of goal approach, or production of a salient action effect. This paper provides a review on relevant findings and theoretical models, and proposes that the impacts of action experience and of agency cues can be explained from an action‐event perspective. In particular, infants’ goal‐predictive gaze‐shifts are seen as resulting from an interplay between bottom‐up processing of perceptual information and top‐down influences exerted by event schemata that store information about previously executed or observed actions. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 1, January 2022.

The visual world of adults consists of objects at various distances, partly occluding one another, substantial and stable across space and time. The visual world of young infants, in contrast, is often fragmented and unstable, consisting not of coherent objects but rather surfaces that move in unpredictable ways. Evidence from computational modeling and from experiments with human infants highlights three kinds of learning that contribute to infants’ knowledge of the visual world: learning via association, learning via active assembly, and learning (...) via visual-manual exploration. Infants acquire knowledge by observing objects move in and out of sight, forming associations of these different views. In addition, the infant’s own self-produced behavior—oculomotor patterns and manual experience, in particular—is an important means by which infants discover and construct their visual world. (shrink)

Infants are sensitive to statistical regularities (i.e., transitional probabilities, or TPs) relevant to segmenting words in fluent speech. However, there is debate about whether tracking TPs results in representations of possible words. Infants show preferential learning of sequences with high TPs (HTPs) as object labels relative to those with low TPs (LTPs). Such findings could mean that only the HTP sequences have a word‐like status, and they are more readily mapped to a referent for that reason. But these findings could (...) also suggest that HTP sequences are easier to encode, just like any other predictable sequence. Here we aimed to distinguish between these explanations. To do so, we built on findings that infants become resistant to learning labels that are not typical of their native language as they approach 2 years of age and add words to their lexicons. If tracking TPs in speech results in identifying candidate words, at this age TPs may have reduced power to confer lexical status when they yield a unit that is very dissimilar to word forms that are typical of infants’ native language. Indeed, we found that at 20 months, English‐learning infants with relatively small vocabularies learned HTP Italian words (but not LTP words) as object labels, while infants with larger vocabularies resisted learning HTP Italian words. These findings suggest that the HTP sequences may be represented as candidate words, and more broadly, that TP statistics are relevant to word learning. (shrink)

Rhythm is key to language acquisition. Across languages, rhythmic features highlight fundamental linguistic elements of the sound stream and structural relations among them. A sensitivity to rhythmic features, which begins in utero, is evident at birth. What is less clear is whether rhythm supports infants' earliest links between language and cognition. Prior evidence has documented that for infants as young as 3 and 4 months, listening to their native language supports the core cognitive capacity of object categorization. This precocious (...) link is initially part of a broader template: listening to a non-native language from the same rhythmic class as and to vocalizations of non-human primates provide English-acquiring infants the same cognitive advantage as does listening to their native language. Here, we implement a machine-learning approach to ask whether there are acoustic properties, available on the surface of these vocalizations, that permit infants' to identify which vocalizations are candidate links to cognition. We provided the model with a robust sample of vocalizations that, from the vantage point of English-acquiring 4-month-olds, either support object categorization or fail to do so. We assess whether supervised ML classification models can distinguish those vocalizations that support cognition from those that do not, and which class of acoustic features best support that classification. Our analysis reveals that principal components derived from rhythm-relevant acoustic features were among the most robust in supporting the classification. Classifications performed using temporal envelope components were also robust. These new findings provide in principle evidence that infants' earliest links between vocalizations and cognition may be subserved by their perceptual sensitivity to rhythmic and spectral elements available on the surface of these vocalizations, and that these may guide infants' identification of candidate links to cognition. (shrink)

Where do human numerical abilities come from? This article is a commentary on Leibovich et al.’s “From 'sense of number' to 'sense of magnitude' —The role of continuous magnitudes in numerical cognition”. Leibovich et al. argue against nativist views of numerical development by noting limitations in newborns’ vision and limitations regarding newborns’ ability to individuate objects. I argue that these considerations do not undermine competing nativist views and that Leibovich et al.'s model itself presupposes that infant learners have (...) numerical representations. (shrink)

There is a growing body of empirical evidence which shows that infants and non-human primates have the ability to represent the mental states of other agents, i.e. that they possess a Theory of Mind. We will argue that this evidence also suggests that infants and non-human primates possess the concept of truth, which, as we will explain, is good news for primitivists about truth. First, we will offer a brief overview of alethic primitivism, focusing on Jamin Asay’s conceptual version of (...) the view. Next, we will survey relevant work on Theory of Mind which indicates that children younger than two and non-human primates are able to attribute false beliefs. Then, we will bring these false-belief data to bear on Asay’s form of primitivism, arguing that the data support two of the four distinctive theses of this view and offering some remarks about the empirical evaluability of the two remaining theses. We hope that our discussion will help to bridge the gap between psychological and philosophical inquiry and that it will encourage further empirical research on the cognitive significance of the concept of truth for humans and other thinking creatures. (shrink)

Language provides rich social information about its speakers. For instance, adults and children make inferences about a speaker's social identity, geographic origins, and group membership based on her language and accent. Although infants prefer speakers of familiar languages, little is known about the developmental origins of humans’ sensitivity to language as marker of social identity. We investigated whether 9-month-olds use the language a person speaks as an indicator of that person's likely social relationships. Infants were familiarized with videos of two (...) people who spoke the same or different languages, and then viewed test videos of those two individuals affiliating or disengaging. Results suggest that infants expected two people who spoke the same language to be more likely to affiliate than two people who spoke different languages. Thus, infants view language as a meaningful social marker and use language to make inferences about third-party social relationships. (shrink)

A prominent hypothesis holds that by speaking to infants in infant‐directed speech (IDS) as opposed to adult‐directed speech (ADS), parents help them learn phonetic categories. Specifically, two characteristics of IDS have been claimed to facilitate learning: hyperarticulation, which makes the categories more separable, and variability, which makes the generalization more robust. Here, we test the separability and robustness of vowel category learning on acoustic representations of speech uttered by Japanese adults in ADS, IDS (addressed to 18‐ to 24‐month olds), (...) or read speech (RS). Separability is determined by means of a distance measure computed between the five short vowel categories of Japanese, while robustness is assessed by testing the ability of six different machine learning algorithms trained to classify vowels to generalize on stimuli spoken by a novel speaker in ADS. Using two different speech representations, we find that hyperarticulated speech, in the case of RS, can yield better separability, and that increased between‐speaker variability in ADS can yield, for some algorithms, more robust categories. However, these conclusions do not apply to IDS, which turned out to yield neither more separable nor more robust categories compared to ADS inputs. We discuss the usefulness of machine learning algorithms run on real data to test hypotheses about the functional role of IDS. (shrink)

Previous research has shown that although infants follow the gaze direction of robots, robot gaze does not facilitate infants’ learning for objects. The present study examined whether robot gaze affects infants’ object learning when the gaze behavior was accompanied by verbalizations. Twelve-month-old infants were shown videos in which a robot with accompanying verbalizations gazed at an object. The results showed that infants not only followed the robot’s gaze direction but also preferentially attended to the cued object when the ostensive verbal (...) signal was present. Moreover, infants showed enhanced processing of the cued object when ostensive and referential verbal signals were increasingly present. These effects were not observed when mere nonverbal sound stimuli instead of verbalizations were added. Taken together, our findings indicate that robot gaze accompanying verbalizations facilitates infants’ object learning, suggesting that verbalizations are important in the design of robot agents from which infants can learn. Keywords: gaze following; humanoid robot; infant learning; verbalization; cognitive development. (shrink)