Eleven-month-olds selectively refer to their social partner following epistemic violations of expectation

• In Event: Poster Session 07
  In Poster Session: PS 07 Topic - Social Cognition

Abstract

Infants’ active behavioral responses to epistemic uncertainty is an understudied area in social cognitive development. One powerful scenario that induces epistemic uncertainty in infants is encountering an unexpected event. A large body of research investigated infants’ implicit detection of uncertainty via attention allocation, visual exploration and neural correlates in response to violations of the physical properties of the world (Gliga & Csibra 2009; Stahl & Feigenson, 2019), ambiguous actions (Köster, Langeloh, & Hoehl, 2019; Reid, Hoehl, Grigutsch, Groendahl, Parise, & Striano, 2009) and semantic incongruency (Parise & Csibra, 2012).

In an interactive social context, when the unexpected event is inherently social and thus induces epistemic uncertainty, studies of infants’ responses to intentional object mislabeling by an adult have demonstrated that infants detect object-referent mismatches and pay selective attention to their social partners (Brooker & Poulin-Dubois, 2013; Koenig & Echols, 2003). Little is known about infants’ explicit communicative responses to such situations, aiming at resolving detected uncertainty. One early developing communicative behaviour – social referencing – has been proposed to serve such an epistemic, information seeking function (Begus & Southgate, 2018; Harris & Lane, 2014).

In the current study, we investigated the role of social referencing looks as explicit preverbal communicative responses to epistemic uncertainty in social contexts. In two experiments, 11-month-olds infants experienced epistemic violation of expectation events – caregivers providing inaccurate labels to familiar objects. In experiment 1, infants (N = 48) saw a series of screen-presented familiar objects, with caregivers enabling three between-subject conditions: Congruent (caregiver providing a matching label to the object), Incongruent (mismatching label, e.g., calling a cat a dog), and No Label (caregiver not providing any label but instead saying: “Look at this!”). Following epistemic violations of expectation events – caregivers providing inaccurate labels referring to familiar objects - infants generated more social looks at their caregivers as compared to when labels were accurate, or no labels were provided. As a reaction to epistemic uncertainty, preverbal and pre-pointing infants used social referencing – a communicative tool previously associated with seeking social input motivated by an epistemic goal, e.g., obtaining relevant and reliable information from a knowledgeable social partner to resolve uncertainty.

In experiment 2, using the within-subject design, when infants’ (N = 32) caregivers provided a mix of inaccurate and accurate labels, social referencing increased indiscriminately following both types of labeling testimony (in congruent and incongruent trials) as compared to when no labels were provided. While tracking labeling provision, infants’ communicative response appears to be based on the global epistemic profile of the caregiver rooted in the inherent expectation of their reliability – an expectation that was violated by instead receiving interleaved congruent and incongruent labels.

Collectively, these results suggest that preverbal infants selectively respond with social looks to epistemic uncertainty from receiving unreliable labeling testimony, either consistently inconsistently, supporting an epistemic function of these communicative behaviors.

Authors

• Marina Bazhydai, Lancaster University
  Presenting Author

• Gert Westermann, Lancaster University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Eugenio Parise, Lancaster University
  Non-Presenting Author