Six- to 12-month-old infants use emotional response, agent identity, and motion cues in associated learning of social events

Poster Session - Development: Childhood and infancy: no. 33.322Open Access JournalStudies have demonstrated that infants as young as 3 months old can distinguish between events containing prosocial and anti-social implications in theater play (Hamlin et al., 2007, 2010). However, the way infants are able to do so is still not fully understood. Here we study the roles of emotional responses, agent identity, and motion in animated social interactions among 6-to-12-month-old infants. Our Experiment 1 tested whether emotional response enhances infants' differentiation between characters in standardized prosocial and antisocial events. At the habituation stage, twenty-seven 6-to-12-month-old infants watched events depicting a climber being helped or hindered to climb up a hill by another character. These events evoked the climber's associated emotional expressions (laughing after being helped or crying after being hindered). In the test stage, the infants viewed two test events with new contexts – the laughing (or crying) climber approached the character who had previously either helped him climb up (consistent with the habituation), or hindered him (inconsistent with habituation). Infants looked significantly longer at the consistent condition, demonstrating that they associated differential emotional responses to the social events, and could apply this knowledge to new contexts. Experiment 2 was conducted to determine what association was learned. Infants might have used the character (who) or the action (what) or the combination of both (who did what) to distinguish events in Experiment 1. We habituated twenty-eight 10-to-12-month-old infants with the same helping/hindering events. Afterwards, novel events defined by: (1) a new character, or (2) a new motion direction, or (3) a new character with a new motion are presented in the test stage. The looking time significantly recovered from the last habituation trial in all three conditions. Our results suggest that emotional responses enhance infants' associated learning in social context, and both agent identity and motion direction are acquired during learning.link_to_OA_fulltextThe 11th Annual Meeting of the Vision Sciences Society (VSS 2011), Naples, FL., 6-11 May 2011. In Journal of Vision, 2011, v. 11 n. 11, article no. 42

Quick CSF in preverbal infants with forced-choice preferential looking paradigm

Poster Session - Development: Childhood and infancy: no. 33.314This journal issue contain abstracts of VSS 2011Open Access JournalThe contrast sensitivity function (CSF) is widely used to estimate individuals' visual capacities with grating spatial frequency. However, the long testing time limits its use in clinical and practical settings. Infants' CSF acquisitions are even more challenging because of their short attention span and inability to understand language. Rapid measurement of CSF (qCSF) based on Bayesian adaptive inference has been applied on adults, and here we examine whether the qCSF is applicable to preverbal infants with a preferential looking paradigm ...link_to_OA_fulltex

10-month-old infants prefer comforters, not helpers

Poster Session I: no. 50Preverbal infants prefer characters that help others in achieving a goal (e.g. climbing up a hill), but how this preference is established remains unknown. In current study, we examined physical and emotional outcome hypotheses by presenting 6- and 10-month-old infants a social interaction similar to what was used in Hamlin et al. (2007). During the learning habituation stage, an agent emotionally comforted or upset a climber by pushing it up (helped) or down (hindered) the hill (physical outcome). On a new platform, we found that 10-month-old infants looked significantly longer when the climber approached the comforter who previously made the climber laugh regardless of what physical outcome was. This indicates infants’ prioritization of emotional over physical outcome and their consideration of a third party’s internal state in forming a social preference, which was absent at 6-month-olds. This leads to the conclusion that this prioritization is unlikely to be innate.link_to_OA_fulltex

Cross-level illusory conjunction between implied (semantic) and actual (perceptual) colors

Poster Session 3: no. 26Goldfarb and Treisman (2010) found observers made more perceptual binding errors (illusory conjunctions, ICs) when the features of an object were inconsistent. They suggested that such mistakes originate from features in the same level. We investigated whether we could induce ICs across perceptual and semantic domains by manipulating the font colour of object words containing implied colours. In Experiment 1, participants saw very brief displays of four Chinese characters (日(sun), 火(fire),山(hill), 水(water)) printed in either yellow, red, green, or blue. Observers had to report the physical color of a randomly selected target word in each trial. We observed significantly higher error rates when the words were printed in colours incongruent with their implied color. We replicated the result with a set of English words (lemon-yellow, water-blue, blood-red, and grass-green) in Experiment 2, which led us to conclude that illusory conjunctions can arise in the gulf between semantic and perceptual domains.link_to_OA_fulltex

Cross-level illusory conjunction between implied (semantic) and actual (perceptual) colors

Poster Session 3: no. 26Goldfarb and Treisman (2010) found observers made more perceptual binding errors (illusory conjunctions, ICs) when the features of an object were inconsistent. They suggested that such mistakes originate from features in the same level. We investigated whether we could induce ICs across perceptual and semantic domains by manipulating the font colour of object words containing implied colours. In Experiment 1, participants saw very brief displays of four Chinese characters (日(sun), 火(fire),山(hill), 水(water)) printed in either yellow, red, green, or blue. Observers had to report the physical color of a randomly selected target word in each trial. We observed significantly higher error rates when the words were printed in colours incongruent with their implied color. We replicated the result with a set of English words (lemon-yellow, water-blue, blood-red, and grass-green) in Experiment 2, which led us to conclude that illusory conjunctions can arise in the gulf between semantic and perceptual domains.link_to_OA_fulltex