The Representation of Giving Actions: Event Construction in the Service of Monitoring Social Relationships.

Giving is a unique attribute of human sharing. In this review, we discuss evidence attesting to our species' preparedness to recognize interactions based on this behavior. We show that infants and adults require minimal cues of resource transfer to relate the participants of a giving event in an interactive unit (A gives X to B) and that such an interpretation does not systematically generalize to superficially similar taking events, which may be interpreted in nonsocial terms (A takes X).

The co-evolution of cooperation and communication: Alternative accounts.

We challenge the proposal that partner-choice ecology explains the evolutionary emergence of ostensive communication in humans. The good fit between these domains might be because of the opposite relation (ostensive communication promotes the evolution of cooperation) or because of the dependence of both these human-specific traits on a more ancient contributor to human cognitive evolution: the use of technology.

Nonverbal Action Interpretation Guides Novel Word Disambiguation in 12-Month-Olds.

Whether young infants can exploit sociopragmatic information to interpret new words is a matter of debate. Based on findings and theories from the action interpretation literature, we hypothesized that 12-month-olds should distinguish communicative object-directed actions expressing reference from instrumental object-directed actions indicative of one's goals, and selectively use the former to identify referents of novel linguistic expressions. This hypothesis was tested across four eye-tracking experiments.

Images of objects are interpreted as symbols: A case study of automatic size measurement.

Are photographs of objects presented on a screen in an experimental context treated as the objects themselves or are they interpreted as symbols standing for objects? We addressed this question by investigating the size Stroop effect-the finding that people take longer to judge the relative size of two pictures when the real-world size of the depicted objects is incongruent with their display size. In Experiment 1, we replicated the size Stroop effect with new stimuli pairs (e.g.

Infants' representation of asymmetric social influence.

In social groups, some individuals have more influence than others, for example, because they are learned from or because they coordinate collective actions. Identifying these influential individuals is crucial to learn about one's social environment. Here, we tested whether infants represent asymmetric social influence among individuals from observing the imitation of movements in the absence of any observable coercion or order.