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Infants’ Processing of Descriptive Norm Violations Predicts Their Behavioural Competencies as Toddlers

Sat, March 23, 2:30 to 4:00pm, Baltimore Convention Center, Floor: Level 3, Room 341

Integrative Statement

Detecting violations of social norms means evaluating actions in terms of their congruence with expected and approved standards (Bicchieri, 2006). However, a prerequisite for such evaluation is action understanding, in the sense of predicting goals and detecting when actions deviate from normal behaviour patterns (descriptive norms). The predictive mechanisms allowing assessment of descriptive norm conformity have been termed internal forward models (IFMs) – these mechanisms develop early and have been suggested as fundamental cornerstones of cognition (Gredebäck, Lindskog, Juvrud, Green, & Marciszko, 2018).

It has also been suggested that early social cognition bootstraps the development of non-social cognition – the cultural intelligence hypothesis states that humans’ high general intelligence compared to other species is a result of specialised social learning mechanisms (van Schaik & Burkart, 2011; Wobber, Herrmann, Hare, Wrangham, & Tomasello, 2014). However, to our knowledge no studies have established that infant social cognition predicts later more general cognitive mechanisms.

The two studies presented here therefore examine the long-term consequences of infants’ abilities to understand and predict descriptively normative behaviour. The first study (Marciszko et al., in prep) begins with IFM measurement in 118 Swedish six-month-olds, operationalised as a combination of two behaviours: predictive looking in a standard action observation task (Gredebäck & Falck-Ytter, 2015); and pupil dilation in response to a non-normative social exchange involving giving (Figure 1). Six-month-olds’ IFMs predict one aspect of executive function at 18 months – simple inhibition (Diamond, 2013), r = .23, p = .014. However, this relation is moderated by mothers’ scaffolding of their child’s learning (Bernier, Carlson, & Whipple, 2010), measured at 10 months by interaction observation. For infants whose mothers scaffold better, the relation between IFMs and later executive function is stronger, b = 1.49, t = 2.79, p = .006 (Figure 2). This first evidence directly supporting the cultural intelligence hypothesis demonstrates that early abilities to process others’ actions in descriptively normative terms foster later development of more general cognitive ability. However, this is only the case given sufficiently high quality parental support.

The second study (Juvrud et al., in press) begins with the same measure of pupil dilation in response to a non-normative giving-exchange (Figure 1) in 59 Swedish nine-month-olds. This study focusses more specifically on the longitudinal relation between understanding and production of giving-related behaviour; the outcome measure is the tendency to produce giving behaviour in response to a give-me gesture at two years. Stronger pupil dilation in response to non-normative giving at nine months predicts giving at two years, r = .42, p < .01. However, early sensitivity to non-normative giving did not predict non-giving-related aspects of social development such as language and non-giving helping.

Together these two studies indicate that the early developing ability to model descriptively normative behaviour (and thus detect violations) has long term effects on cognitive ability and behaviour. However, the generality of the longitudinal relations in the first study juxtaposed with the specificity to giving-related behaviour in the second study together suggest that both specialised and generalised mechanisms are responsible for these longitudinal relations.

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