An asynchronous, hands-off workflow for looking time experiments with infants.

The study of infant gaze has long been a key tool for understanding the developing mind. However, labor-intensive data collection and processing limit the speed at which this understanding can be advanced. Here, we demonstrate an asynchronous workflow for conducting violation-of-expectation (VoE) experiments, which is fully "hands-off" for the experimenter.

Toddlers Prefer Agents Who Help Those Facing Harder Tasks.

Capacities to understand and evaluate others' actions are fundamental to human social life. Infants and toddlers are sensitive to the costs of others' actions, infer others' values from the costs of the actions they take, and prefer those who help others to those who hinder them, but it is largely unknown whether and how cost considerations inform early understanding of third-party prosocial actions. In three experiments ( = 94), we asked whether 16-month-old toddlers value agents who selectively help those who need it most.

Infants rationally infer the goals of other people's reaches in the absence of first-person experience with reaching actions.

Does knowledge of other people's minds grow from concrete experience to abstract concepts? Cognitive scientists have hypothesized that infants' first-person experience, acting on their own goals, leads them to understand others' actions and goals. Indeed, classic developmental research suggests that before infants reach for objects, they do not see others' reaches as goal-directed. In five experiments (N = 117), we test an alternative hypothesis: Young infants view reaching as undertaken for a purpose but are open-minded about the specific goals that reaching actions are aimed to achieve.

iCatcher+: Robust and Automated Annotation of Infants' and Young Children's Gaze Behavior From Videos Collected in Laboratory, Field, and Online Studies.

Technological advances in psychological research have enabled large-scale studies of human behavior and streamlined pipelines for automatic processing of data. However, studies of infants and children have not fully reaped these benefits because the behaviors of interest, such as gaze duration and direction, still have to be extracted from video through a laborious process of manual annotation, even when these data are collected online. Recent advances in computer vision raise the possibility of automated annotation of these video data.

Knowing before doing: Review and mega-analysis of action understanding in prereaching infants.

The relationship between experience and knowledge is one of the oldest and deepest questions in psychology. In developmental science, research on this question has focused on prereaching infants who cannot yet retrieve objects by reaching for and grasping them. Over the past 2 decades, behavioral research in this population has produced two seemingly contradictory findings: After first-person experience with reaching via "sticky mittens" training, (a) infants come to expect that people reach efficiently, toward goal objects, but (b) under some conditions, they can express these expectations without training.

Dangerous Ground: One-Year-Old Infants are Sensitive to Peril in Other Agents' Action Plans.

Do infants appreciate that other people's actions may fail, and that these failures endow risky actions with varying degrees of negative utility (i.e., danger)? Three experiments, including a pre-registered replication, addressed this question by presenting 12- to 15-month-old infants ( = 104, 52 female, majority White) with an animated agent who jumped over trenches of varying depth towards its goals.

Moderated Online Data-Collection for Developmental Research: Methods and Replications.

Online data collection methods are expanding the ease and access of developmental research for researchers and participants alike. While its popularity among developmental scientists has soared during the COVID-19 pandemic, its potential goes beyond just a means for safe, socially distanced data collection. In particular, advances in video conferencing software has enabled researchers to engage in face-to-face interactions with participants from nearly any location at any time.

Origins of the concepts cause, cost, and goal in prereaching infants.

We investigated the origins and interrelations of causal knowledge and knowledge of agency in 3-month-old infants, who cannot yet effect changes in the world by reaching for, grasping, and picking up objects. Across 5 experiments, = 152 prereaching infants viewed object-directed reaches that varied in efficiency (following the shortest physically possible path vs. a longer path), goal (lifting an object vs.

Worth the wait: Children trade off delay and reward in self- and other-benefiting decisions.

Human prosocial behaviors are supported by early-emerging psychological processes that detect and fulfill the needs of others. However, little is known about the mechanisms that enable children to deliver benefits to others at costs to the self, which requires weighing other-regarding and self-serving preferences. We used an intertemporal choice paradigm to systematically study and compare these behaviors in 5-year-old children.

Ten-month-old infants infer the value of goals from the costs of actions.

Infants understand that people pursue goals, but how do they learn which goals people prefer? We tested whether infants solve this problem by inverting a mental model of action planning, trading off the costs of acting against the rewards actions bring. After seeing an agent attain two goals equally often at varying costs, infants expected the agent to prefer the goal it attained through costlier actions. These expectations held across three experiments that conveyed cost through different physical path features (height, width, and incline angle), suggesting that an abstract variable-such as "force," "work," or "effort"-supported infants' inferences.

Six-month-old infants expect agents to minimize the cost of their actions.

Substantial evidence indicates that infants expect agents to move directly to their goals when no obstacles block their paths, but the representations that articulate this expectation and its robustness have not been characterized. Across three experiments (total N=60), 6-month-old infants responded to a novel, curvilinear action trajectory on the basis of its efficiency, in accord with the expectation that an agent will move to its goal on the least costly path that the environment affords. Infants expected minimally costly action when presented with a novel constraint, and extended this expectation to agents who had previously acted inefficiently.

A common cortical metric for spatial, temporal, and social distance.

Distance describes more than physical space: we speak of close friends and distant relatives, and of the near future and distant past. Did these ubiquitous spatial metaphors arise in language coincidentally or did they arise because they are rooted in a common neural computation? To address this question, we used statistical pattern recognition techniques to analyze human fMRI data. First, a machine learning algorithm was trained to discriminate patterns of fMRI responses based on relative egocentric distance within trials from one distance domain (e.