Expanding Social Circles: Infants see the affiliates of their caregivers as more relevant to them than others.

• In Event: Early Representations of Caregiver Relationships and Consequences for Social Cognition

Abstract

Humans are born into rich and complex social networks that we depend on to survive. While adults readily use information embedded in this network to form new relationships, little is known about the development of these intuitions. For example, imagine that two people who you have never met both ask you to lunch. One is a complete stranger and the other is your brother’s fiancé. Who would you choose to eat with? Most people would be inclined to go with the fiancé–they are more relevant to you by way of their relationship with your brother. Are infants similarly inclined to expect that those who interact with their close social partners are members of their own social network, and to engage with them accordingly. To answer these questions, the current studies built on previous research showing that when infants observe strangers, they see imitation as a cue of affiliation (Powell & Spelke, 2016). In the first study, 12-month-old infants saw one set of videos in which their own caregiver imitated one puppet and not another and another set of videos that featured another infants caregivers and a new set of puppets. Infants reached preferentially for the puppet imitated by their own caregiver, but not for the puppet imitated by another infant’s caregiver (N=16, cut short due to COVID-19, Bayes Factor of 8.25 in favor of the alternative hypothesis). What might be driving this reaching behavior? We hypothesized that infants used their own caregiver’s imitation to infer their own relationship with the puppet. We tested this hypothesis by presenting an ambiguous audio-visual matching test: while both puppets moved their mouths, one voice called the infant’s own name in infant directed speech. In two online studies (N=22;N=24), infants looked more at the puppet their caregiver had imitated during this test (BF=12.5 in favor of the alt. hypothesis). This looking preference did not occur when the two puppets were silent, when the two puppets were presented with music, nor when the imitator was another infant’s caregiver. It suggests that infants inferred that the puppet who had interacted with their caregiver was the one who would call them by name. Together, these studies suggest that infants represent their own relationships with their caregivers and use their relationships to guide the interactions they have with new individuals. All experiments were pre-registered and can be found here: https://osf.io/z8r7t/

Authors

• Ashley J Thomas, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
  Presenting Author

• Rebecca Saxe, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
  Non-Presenting Author

• Elizabeth S. Spelke, Harvard University
  Non-Presenting Author