The social foundation of executive function

In this study, we propose that infant social cognition may ‘bootstrap' the successive development of domain‐general cognition in line with the cultural intelligence hypothesis. Using a longitudinal design, 6‐month‐old infants (N = 118) were assessed on two basic social cognitive tasks targeting the abilities to share attention with others and understanding other peoples' actions. At 10 months, we measured the quality of the child's social learning environment, indexed by parent's abilities to provide scaffolding behaviors during a problem‐solving task. Eight months later, the children were followed up with a cognitive test‐battery, including tasks of inhibitory control and working memory. Our results showed that better infant social action understanding interacted with better parental scaffolding skills in predicting simple inhibitory control in toddlerhood. This suggests that infants' who are better at understanding other's actions are also better equipped to make the most of existing social learning opportunities, which in turn may benefit future non‐social cognitive outcomes

Action Prediction Allows Hypothesis Testing via Internal Forward Models at 6 Months of Age

We propose that action prediction provides a cornerstone in a learning process known as internal forward models. According to this suggestion infants’ predictions (looking to the mouth of someone moving a spoon upward) will moments later be validated or proven false (spoon was in fact directed toward a bowl), information that is directly perceived as the distance between the predicted and actual goal. Using an individual difference approach we demonstrate that action prediction correlates with the tendency to react with surprise when social interactions are not acted out as expected (action evaluation). This association is demonstrated across tasks and in a large sample (n = 118) at 6 months of age. These results provide the first indication that infants might rely on internal forward models to structure their social world. Additional analysis, consistent with prior work and assumptions from embodied cognition, demonstrates that the latency of infants’ action predictions correlate with the infant’s own manual proficiency

An Embodied Account of Early Executive-Function Development : Prospective Motor Control in Infancy Is Related to Inhibition and Working Memory

The importance of executive functioning for later life outcomes, along with its potential to be positively affected by intervention programs, motivates the need to find early markers of executive functioning. In this study, 18-month-olds performed three executive-function tasksinvolving simple inhibition, working memory, and more complex inhibitionand a motion-capture task assessing prospective motor control during reaching. We demonstrated that prospective motor control, as measured by the peak velocity of the first movement unit, is related to infants' performance on simple-inhibition and working memory tasks. The current study provides evidence that motor control and executive functioning are intertwined early in life, which suggests an embodied perspective on executive-functioning development. We argue that executive functions and prospective motor control develop from a common source and a single motive: to control action. This is the first demonstration that low-level movement planning is related to higher-order executive control early in life

Saccadic reaction times in infants and adults

This repository contains the following: * A pre-print of the first article based on the data: Kenward, B., Koch, F., Forssman, L., Brehm, J., Tidemann, I., Sundqvist, A., Marciszko, C., Hermansen, T. K., Heimann, M., Gredebäck, G. (in press). Saccadic reaction times in infants and adults: spatiotemporal factors, gender, and inter-laboratory variation. Developmental Psychology. * The full experiment project files and instructions for running the experiment, which would enable anyone with the appropriate software, hardware, and expertise to replicate the experiment. * All raw data. * The analysis tools used for the first manuscript (insert reference upon publication) which firstly allow the extraction of the reactive saccades from the raw gaze data, and secondly create the statistical models for hypothesis testing. Note that as detailed in the “Running the experiment” and “Raw data folders”, there are methods and data reported in this repository which are not described in any detail in the first article. For enquiries contact Ben Kenward on [email protected]. Updated 23/3/201