3-035 - The influence of social information on infants’ object representations

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

The proposed paper symposium highlights research that has taken place at the junction of two important developmental domains—object and social cognition. Together these papers report some of the striking ways that social context can both control the construction of infants’ object representations, and mitigate some of the robust limitations that have been observed in non-social contexts.

The first two papers describe how infants’ working memory performance can be significantly improved when tested in a social context. Paper 1 demonstrates this by showing how infants’ representations of object identity and object quantity can be facilitated by another persons’ attention towards those objects. Paper 2 describes how infants use social cues related to ownership and spoken language to transcend their normal working memory limitations.

The second two papers describe how infants’ representations of individual objects can be affected by social information. Paper 3 demonstrates infants’ bias to individuate agents based on the sociomoral behavior they exhibit towards others, despite contradictory surface property information (e.g., an agent that acts ‘nice’ and an identical-looking agent that acts ‘mean’ are represented as two distinct individuals). Paper 4 shows how infants’ individuation decisions are affected by their Theory of Mind capabilities; Infants’ object representations are significantly influenced by other people’s belief states about the presence, absence, or identity of those same objects.

Despite using very different methodologies (preferential crawling, anticipatory looking, manual-search, violation-of-expectation), the papers in the proposed symposium present a cohesive and compelling description of how social information affects infants’ object representations.

Sub Unit

• Cognitive Processes

Chair

• Erik Cheries, UMass Amherst

Individual Presentations

• The presence of an agent impacts infants’ working memory for objects - Presenting Author: Melissa Kibbe, Boston University

• Social Knowledge Influences Infants’ Working Memory Computations - Presenting Author: Lisa Feigenson, Johns Hopkins University; Aimee E Stahl, The College of New Jersey

• Individuation by sociomoral behavior in 11-month-old infants - Presenting Author: Erik Cheries, UMass Amherst; Hernando Taborda-Osorio, UMass Amherst

• Fourteen-month old infants can attribute correct and mistaken individuation of objects when they represent others’ beliefs - Presenting Author: Dora Kampis, Central European University; Ágnes Melinda Kovács, Central European University