Poster #191 - Change detection in 11-month-olds: Early preference for animacy

• In Event: 3-003 - Poster Session 09
  In Poster Session: PS 09 Section - Social Cognition

Integrative Statement

Humans are efficient at detecting animate agents in the visual field, and preferentially attend to animate over inanimate visual stimuli (New, Cosmides, & Tooby, 2007; Ro, Friggel, & Lavie, 2007). Animacy detection would have had fitness consequences during human evolutionary history as it allowed for fast identification of social partners, antagonists and potential predators in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness (New et al., 2007). New, Cosmides, and Tooby tested adults’ preferential attention to animate entities, using a change detection paradigm and found that participants were quicker and more accurate at detection changes to animate stimuli (New et al., 2007).
As early as 3 months of age, infants are able to distinguish between animate and inanimate motion (Rochat, Morgan, & Carpenter, 1997) and show a preference for animate motion (Frankenhuis, House, Barrett, & Johnson, 2013). The aim of this study is to establish whether by the age of 11 months, children’s preferential attention to animate entities extends to change detection paradigms akin to that used by New et al. (2007). To adapt the paradigm for infants, we incorporated habituation and dishabituation into a change detection paradigm. The stimuli in our study are a subset of the scenes used by New, Cosmides and Tooby (2007). We picked a total of eight scenes, four relating to animate changes (man, lion, officer, horse) and four relating to inanimate changes (cup, building, tree, tv). At the beginning of each trial, participants were habituated to Scene A. Scene A was shown for 15 seconds and then masked by a blank screen. Scene A and the mask were shown on a loop until the child habituated. Once looking time dropped, the child was presented with Scene A’, which differed from Scene A in that one object was removed. We measured whether the child dishabituated to the change, which would suggest that the child has noticed a difference between Scene A and A’. Using an eye tracker, we also recorded the infants’ eye gaze. We were particularly interested in attention to areas of interest around the changing object. As animacy detection develops early in life (Fantz, 1963; Rochat, Morgan, & Carpenter, 1997) we predicted that children will detect changes to animate entities more frequently than changes to inanimate entities. Our results showed that there was a marginally significant difference for dishabituation rates, with children dishabituating more often to animate changes compared to inanimate changes (t(23) = 1.96, p< .062). This supports our hypothesis that by the age of 11 months, children detect animate objects reliability and prioritize them over inanimate objects.

Authors

• Ruth Hofrichter, McMaster University
  Presenting Author

• M. D. Rutherford, McMaster University
  Non-Presenting Author