Pointing Gesture: Sex, Temperament, and Prosocial Behavior. A Cross-Cultural Study with Italian and Dutch Infants.

• In Event: Poster Session 01
  In Poster Session: PS 01 Topic - Social Cognition

Abstract

One of the most important abilities in infancy is the Declarative Pointing Production (DPP), which is the capacity to orient the attention of another person towards a third object or event through a deictic gesture (Camaioni, 1997). DPP represents a crucial developmental milestone, as it is an indicator of the understanding of other’s intentions (Camaioni et al., 2004) and the precursor of subsequent linguistic skills (Colonnesi et al., 2010) and ToM abilities (Cochet et al., 2017). Thus far little is known about the variables that may contribute to DPP individual differences among infants. Furthermore, some authors suggested that DPP can be best understood in the social view of the development of cooperation (Tomasello et al., 2007), and as such, as an early precursor of prosocial behavior in fact, infants begin to help others shortly after their first year and progressively increase this behavior in frequency and complexity (Dahl, 2015). Whether DPP is a precursor of early prosocial behavior is still an unanswered issue. The aim of the present study is twofold: firstly, to investigate whether cultural and biological (sex and temperament) factors might relate to DPP individual differences; secondly, investigate the association between DPP and emerging prosocial behaviors around the first year of life.
Participants were fifty-one 12 and 15- month-old Italian and Dutch typically developed infants (45% Italian; 35% males). Infants’ DPP was assessed with an experimental pointing task (adaptation of Camaioni et al., 2004). DPP was coded second-by-second with The Observer XT 13 software to obtain systematic data about frequency and duration of the DPP. Parents completed via Qualtrics socio-demographics, IBQ (Putnam, et al., 2014) or ECBQ VSFs (Putnam et al., 2010), and Q point (Perucchini et al., 1999) which measures infants DPP in naturalistic environments. Prosocial behavior was assessed among a sub-sample of forty-four infants (52% Italian; 30% boys) through the “Paper-ball” task (Warneken & Tomasello, 2007), testing whether infants helped the experimenter to place three paper balls inside a container with no request.
Results showed no difference in DPP between the two cultural groups (DPP t = .455; QPOINT t = .268). Girls showed longer and wider number of negative (DNP: t = -2,63; p=.012; NNP: t = -2,704; p = .010) and neutral pointing (DNeuP: t = -3,01; p = .005; NNeuP: t=-2,551; p=.014). As to the relation between temperamental dimensions and DPP, effortful control was significantly related to parent-reported DPP (r = .49; p = .001). As to the second aim, we found a significant relationship between parental reported DPP and prosocial behavior. In particular, the more the infants produced pointing gestures, the higher they scored in prosocial behavior (t=.36; p=.016) and the less in the final latency of prosocial behavior (t = -.43; p = .004).
Overall, the study provides new insights for the understanding of infants pointing gesture ability, emphasizing, in particular, the route of prosocial motive.

Authors

• Fabiola Silletti, Other
  Presenting Author

• Barbara Iacobellis, University of Bari Aldo Moro
  Non-Presenting Author

• Cristina Semeraro, University of Bari
  Non-Presenting Author

• Eliala Alice Salvadori, University of Amsterdam
  Non-Presenting Author

• Mariangela Difilippo, Università degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro
  Non-Presenting Author

• Antonella Ricciardi, Università degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro
  Non-Presenting Author

• Gabrielle Coppola, University of Bari Aldo Moro
  Non-Presenting Author

• Cristina Colonnesi, University of Amsterdam
  Non-Presenting Author