Evidence for Referential Expectation in Four-Month-Old Infants

Infants’ sensitivity to selectively attend human speech and to process it in a unique way has been widely reported in the past. However, in order to successfully acquire language, one should also understand that speech is a referential symbol system, and that words can stand for other entities in the world. While there has been some evidence showing that young infants can make inferences about the communicative intentions of a speaker, whether they would also appreciate the direct relation between a specific word and its referent, is still unknown. In the present study we tested four-month-old infants to see whether they would expect to find a referent when they hear human speech. Our results showed that compared to other auditory stimulus or to silence, when infants were listening to speech they were more prepared to find some visual referents of the words, but only if the speaker also provided additional referential cues. Thus, our study is the first to report evidence that infants at a very young age already appreciate the symbolic nature of language and that they understand the referential relation between auditory words and physical objects, even if they do not have yet any knowledge about the meanings of words

Can you see what i am talking about? Human speech triggers referential expectation in four-month-old infants

Infants’ sensitivity to selectively attend to human speech and to process it in a unique way has been widely reported in the past. However, in order to successfully acquire language, one should also understand that speech is a referential, and that words can stand for other entities in the world. While there has been some evidence showing that young infants can make inferences about the communicative intentions of a speaker, whether they would also appreciate the direct relationship between a specific word and its referent, is still unknown. In the present study we tested four-month-old infants to see whether they would expect to find a referent when they hear human speech. Our results showed that compared to other auditory stimuli or to silence, when infants were listening to speech they were more prepared to find some visual referents of the words, as signalled by their faster orienting towards the visual objects. Hence, our study is the first to report evidence that infants at a very young age already understand the referential relationship between auditory words and physical objects, thus show a precursor in appreciating the symbolic nature of language, even if they do not understand yet the meanings of words

Learning from communication versus observation in great apes

This research was supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013)/ERC Grant 609819 (SOMICS project).When human infants are intentionally addressed by others, they tend to interpret the information communicated as being relevant to them and worth acquiring. For humans, this attribution of relevance leads to a preference to learn from communication, making it possible to accumulate knowledge over generations. Great apes are sensitive to communicative cues, but do these cues also activate an expectation of relevance? In an observational learning paradigm, we demonstrated to a sample of nonhuman great apes (bonobos, chimpanzees, orangutans; N = 24) how to operate on a food dispenser device. When apes had the opportunity to choose between an effective and an ineffective method in the baseline conditions, the majority of them chose the effective method. However, when the ineffective method was demonstrated in a communicative way, they failed to prioritize efficiency, even though they were equally attentive in both conditions. This suggests that the ostensive demonstration elicited an expectation of relevance that modified apes’ interpretation of the situation, potentially leading to a preference to learn from communication, as human children do.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Prompting teaching modulates children's encoding of novel information by facilitating higher-level structure learning and hindering lower-level statistical learning

Young children are not only prepared to learn from teaching, but they also start to spontaneously teach others, indicating that teaching is a natural instinct of the humankind. During childhood, teaching seems to precede the emergence of several cognitive abilities, so the question arises: how does teaching affect the development of later emerging cognitive skills? Since teaching requires explicit, accessible representations of the knowledge of the teacher, we hypothesized that the motivation to teach might impact the way children encode novel information, by biasing them towards a model-based encoding, which can help them to structure the incoming information in a more abstract and explicitly accessible way. In our study, 7–10-year-old children were presented with a well-established probabilistic sequence learning task on two consecutive days, after receiving an instruction that on the second day, they would have to teach a peer about the task. During the task, we could simultaneously measure two different types of learning: model-free learning of local (lower-level) statistical correlations and model-based learning of the global (higher-level) statistical structures of the sequences. We predicted that in case the motivation to teach facilitates model-based encoding, children who received the instruction to teach would perform better in learning the higher-level statistical structures than children in the control group, who did not receive an instruction to teach. Furthermore, since previous studies showed competition between the two types of encoding processes during development, we also predicted that facilitating children's model-based learning will impair their model-free learning of the lower-level statistical correlations. Our results confirmed both predictions, showing an improved model-based higher-level structure learning and an impaired model-free lower-level statistical correlation learning in the Teaching Group, compared to the controls. Thus, prompting teaching affects children's encoding of the novel information, by biasing them to learn in a model-based way, which can help to build more abstract and explicitly accessible representations that could be shared with others

An object memory bias induced by communicative reference

In humans, a good proportion of knowledge, including knowledge about objects and object kinds, is acquired via social learning by direct communication from others. If communicative signals raise the expectation of social learning about objects, intrinsic (permanent) features that support object recognition are relevant to store into memory, while extrinsic (accidental) object properties can be ignored. We investigated this hypothesis by instructing participants to memorise shape-colour associations that constituted either an extrinsic object property (the colour of the box that contained the object, Experiment 1) or an intrinsic one (the colour of the object, Experiment 2). Compared to a non-communicative context, communicative presentation of the objects impaired participants’ performance when they recalled extrinsic object properties, while their incidental memory of the intrinsic shape-colour associations was not affected. Communicative signals had no effect on performance when the task required the memorisation of intrinsic object properties. The negative effect of communicative reference on the memory of extrinsic properties was also confirmed in Experiment 3, where this property was object location. Such a memory bias suggests that referent objects in communication tend to be seen as representatives of their kind rather than as individuals

Toddlers favor communicatively presented information over statistical reliability in learning about artifacts

Observed associations between events can be validated by statistical information of reliability or by testament of communicative sources. We tested whether toddlers learn from their own observation of efficiency, assessed by statistical information on reliability of interventions, or from communicatively presented demonstration, when these two potential types of evidence of validity of interventions on a novel artifact are contrasted with each other. Eighteen-month-old infants observed two adults, one operating the artifact by a method that was more efficient (2/3 probability of success) than that of the other (1/3 probability of success). Compared to the Baseline condition, in which communicative signals were not employed, infants tended to choose the less reliable method to operate the artifact when this method was demonstrated in a communicative manner in the Experimental condition. This finding demonstrates that, in certain circumstances, communicative sanctioning of reliability may override statistical evidence for young learners. Such a bias can serve fast and efficient transmission of knowledge between generations

A gyermekkori családon belül megtapasztalt érzelemkifejezési módok elemzése a felnőttkorban jellemző párkapcsolati mintázatokkal való összefüggésben

INST: L_135A dolgozatban két olyan fiatal nő esetét mutatom be, akik jelenleg párkapcsolati, vagy egyéb szociális kapcsolati elakadástól szenvednek. Az esetek ismertetése során arra fókuszálok, hogy a gyermekkori tapasztalatok feltárása során hogyan bontakoztak ki hasonlóságok és különbségek a két eset között a gyermekkorban megtapasztalt szülői érzelemkifejezési módok, az érzelemkifejezés és kötődés közötti lehetséges összefüggések, és a jelenlegi társkapcsolati dinamikák szempontjából

A narratív self emlékezeti tükörben

A tanulmány azt a kérdést járja körül, hogy élettörténeti szövegekben mennyiben jelenik meg az elbeszélő selfkoherenciája. Bizonyos emlékezeti és narratív koherenciamutatók feltételezhetően szoros kapcsolatban állnak a selfkoherenciával, így a kérdésre segítenek választ adni. Kiindulásunk alapját Fitzgerald (1992, 1996) selfnarratív elmélete képezi, amelyet a reminiszcenciahatás értelmezésére dolgozott ki. Ez az elmélet a személyes integráltságot a felidézett eseményeknek az élettörténeti időben való eloszlási mintázatában keresi. Fitzgerald (1992) eljárását követő, 25 idős személlyel végzett vizsgálatunkban a reminiszcenciagörbe (vagyis az adott életkori szakaszra vonatkozó emlékek relatív gyakoriságának eloszlása) egyértelműen mutatja a reminiszcenciahatást: az emlékek száma 16 és 20 éves kor között tendenciaszerűen emelkedik, majd 21 és 30 éves kor között éri el maximumát, végül a 31-35 éves életkori szakaszban radikálisan csökken.  Az elemzés következő lépcsőjében a narratív koherencia megállapítására K. J. Gergen és M. M. Gergen (1988) jól formáltsági kritériumrendszerét alkalmaztuk. Ennek a mutatónak a használata leszűkíti a reminiszcenciahatás tartományát 21 és 25 év közé. Eredményünk a selfnarratív hipotézis kiegészítéseként értelmezhető: 1. azok a személyek, akik a leginkább jól formált, koherens történeteket idézik fel, elsősorban ebből a szűkebb reminiszcenciacsúcsból választják jelentős életeseményeiket; 2. a jól formált csoporttal szemben a kevésbé jól formált eseményeket elbeszélő személyek egyáltalán nem mutattak reminiszcenciahatást; 3. a szűkebb reminiszcenciaövezet érvényességét, a személyek jól formáltsági csoportjaitól függetlenül, az emlékek kronológiai mintázatának és jól formáltságának összevetése is alátámasztja. Az önéletrajzi narratívumok elemzésében alkalmazott harmadik eljárás a történetek „általánosított tanulságait" kifejező indexelés (Schank, 1990, 1999). Mintánkban nem találtunk összefüggést a reminiszcenciahatás és a történetek indexelhetősége között, annak ellenére, hogy azok a személyek, akik koherens történeteket meséltek, egyben indexelhetőbb emlékekkel is rendelkeztek. Értelmezésünk szerint a jelentős események felidézését irányító általánosított tanulságok explicit használata nem köthető meghatározott életszakaszhoz, a koherens életút felépítéséhez viszont szükség van tanulságos emlékekre

Results.

<p>Number of infants choosing the reliable and the unreliable button as a function of demonstration condition.</p