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.

Infants expect agents to minimize the collective cost of collaborative actions.

This paper argues that human infants address the challenges of optimizing, recognizing, and interpreting collaborative behaviors by assessing their collective efficiency. This hypothesis was tested by using a looking-time study. Fourteen-month-olds (N = 32) were familiarized with agents performing a collaborative action in computer animations.

Structural asymmetries in the representation of giving and taking events.

Across languages, GIVE and TAKE verbs have different syntactic requirements: GIVE mandates a patient argument to be made explicit in the clause structure, whereas TAKE does not. Experimental evidence suggests that this asymmetry is rooted in prelinguistic assumptions about the minimal number of event participants that each action entails. The present study provides corroborating evidence for this proposal by investigating whether the observation of giving and taking actions modulates the inclusion of patients in the represented event.

Young domestic chicks spontaneously represent the absence of objects.

Absence is a notion that is usually captured by language-related concepts like zero or negation. Whether nonlinguistic creatures encode similar thoughts is an open question, as everyday behavior marked by absence (of food, of social partners) can be explained solely by expecting presence somewhere else. We investigated 8-day-old chicks' looking behavior in response to events violating expectations about the presence or absence of an object.

Three cognitive mechanisms for knowledge tracking.

We welcome Phillips et al.'s proposal to separate the understanding of "knowledge" from that of "beliefs." We argue that this distinction is best specified at the level of the cognitive mechanisms.

Computing Joint Action Costs: Co-Actors Minimize the Aggregate Individual Costs in an Action Sequence.

Successful performance in cooperative activities relies on efficient task distribution between co-actors. Previous research found that people often forgo individual efficiency in favor of co-efficiency (i.e.

For 19-Month-Olds, What Happens On-Screen Stays On-Screen.

Humans rely extensively on external representations such as drawings, maps, and animations. While animations are widely used in infancy research, little is known about how infants interpret them. In this study, we asked whether 19-month-olds take what they see on a screen to be happening here and now, or whether they think that on-screen events are decoupled from the immediate environment.

Facilitation of object encoding in infants by the observation of giving.

We propose that humans are prepared to interpret giving as a diagnostic cue of reciprocal-exchange relations from infancy. A prediction following from this hypothesis is that infants will represent the identity of an object they see being given, because this information is critical for evaluating potential future reciprocation. Across three looking-time experiments we tested whether the observation of a transfer action induces 12-month-olds to encode the identity of a single object handled by an agent.

The effect of source claims on statement believability and speaker accountability.

What is the effect of source claims (such as "I saw it" or "Somebody told me") on the believability of statements, and what mechanisms are responsible for this effect? In this study, we tested the idea that source claims impact statement believability by modulating the extent to which a speaker is perceived to be committed to (and thereby accountable for) the truth of her assertion. Across three experiments, we presented participants with statements associated with different source claims, asked them to judge how much they believed the statements, and how much the speaker was responsible if the statement turned out to be false. We found that (1) statement believability predicted speaker accountability independently of a statement's perceived prior likelihood or associated source claim; (2) being associated with a claim to first-hand ("I saw that .

Twelve-month-olds disambiguate new words using mutual-exclusivity inferences.

Representing objects in terms of their kinds enables inferences based on the long-term knowledge made available through kind concepts. For example, children readily use lexical knowledge linked to familiar kind concepts to disambiguate new words (e.g.

The effect of disagreement on children's source memory performance.

Source representations play a role both in the formation of individual beliefs as well as in the social transmission of such beliefs. Both of these functions suggest that source information should be particularly useful in the context of interpersonal disagreement. Three experiments with an identical design (one original study and two replications) with 3- to 4-year-old-children (N = 100) assessed whether children's source memory performance would improve in the face of disagreement and whether such an effect interacts with different types of sources (first- vs.

Can infants adopt underspecified contents into attributed beliefs? Representational prerequisites of theory of mind.

Recent evidence suggests that young infants, as well as nonhuman apes, can anticipate others' behavior based on their false beliefs. While such behaviors have been proposed to be accounted by simple associations between agents, objects, and locations, human adults are undoubtedly endowed with sophisticated theory of mind abilities. For example, they can attribute mental contents about abstract or non-existing entities, or beliefs whose content is poorly specified.

Electrophysiological investigation of infants' understanding of understanding.

Social cognition might play a critical role in language acquisition and comprehension, as mindreading may be necessary to infer the intended meaning of linguistic expressions uttered by communicative partners. In three electrophysiological experiments, we explored the interplay between belief attribution and language comprehension of 14-month-old infants. First, we replicated our earlier finding: infants produced an N400 effect to correctly labelled objects when the labels did not match a communicative partner's beliefs about the referents.

Do 15-month-old infants prefer helpers? A replication of Hamlin . (2007).

Hamlin . found in 2007 that preverbal infants displayed a preference for helpers over hinderers. The robustness of this finding and the conditions under which infant sociomoral evaluation can be elicited has since been debated.

Giving, but not taking, actions are spontaneously represented as social interactions: Evidence from modulation of lower alpha oscillations.

Unlike taking, which can be redescribed in non-social and object-directed terms, acts of giving are invariably expressed across languages in a three-argument structure relating agent, patient, and object. Developmental evidence suggests this difference in the syntactic entailment of the patient role to be rooted in a prelinguistic understanding of giving as a patient-directed, hence obligatorily social, action. We hypothesized that minimal cues of possession transfer, known to induce this interpretation in preverbal infants, should similarly encourage adults to perceive the patient of giving, but not taking, actions as integral participant of the observed event, even without cues of overt involvement in the transfer.

Witnessing, Remembering, and Testifying: Why the Past Is Special for Human Beings.

The past is undeniably special for human beings. To a large extent, both individuals and collectives define themselves through history. Moreover, humans seem to have a special way of cognitively representing the past: episodic memory.

Minimal Cues of Possession Transfer Compel Infants to Ascribe the Goal of Giving.

Human infants' readiness to interpret impoverished object-transfer events as acts of giving suggests the existence of a dedicated action schema for identifying interactions based on active object transfer. Here we investigated the sensitivity of this giving schema by testing whether 15-month-olds would interpret the displacement of an object as an agent's goal even if it could be dismissed as a side effect of a different goal. Across two looking-time experiments, we showed that, when the displacement only resulted in a change of object location, infants expected the agent to pursue the other goal.

Rationality in Joint Action: Maximizing Coefficiency in Coordination.

When people perform simple actions, they often behave efficiently, minimizing the costs of movement for the expected benefit. The present study addressed the question of whether this efficiency scales up to dyads working together to achieve a shared goal: Do people act efficiently as a group (i.e.

Retrospective attribution of false beliefs in 3-year-old children.

A current debate in psychology and cognitive science concerns the nature of young children's ability to attribute and track others' beliefs. Beliefs can be attributed in at least two different ways: prospectively, during the observation of belief-inducing situations, and in a retrospective manner, based on episodic retrieval of the details of the events that brought about the beliefs. We developed a task in which only retrospective attribution, but not prospective belief tracking, would allow children to correctly infer that someone had a false belief.