Human infants are aroused and concerned by moral transgressions.

Humans reason and care about ethical issues, such as avoiding unnecessary harm. But what enables us to develop a moral capacity? This question dates back at least to ancient Greece and typically results in the traditional opposition between sentimentalism (the view that morality is mainly driven by socioaffective processes) and rationalism [the view that morality is mainly driven by (socio)cognitive processes or reason]. Here, we used multiple methods (eye-tracking and observations of expressive behaviors) to assess the role of both cognitive and socioaffective processes in infants' developing morality.

No Correlation Between Mood or Motivation and the Processing of Global and Local Information.

Mood has been argued to impact the breadth of human attention, but the empirical evidence supporting this claim remains shaky. Gable and Harmon-Jones (2008) have attributed previous empirical inconsistencies regarding the effect of mood on attentional breath to a critical role of approach/avoidance motivation. They demonstrated that the combination of positive affect with high, but not with low, motivational intensity improves performance during processing local information and impairs performance during processing global information.

The transfer of global and local processing modes.

Förster and Dannenberg's (2010) GLOMOsys theory claims that people process perceived events and internal information in a more global or more local processing mode and that adopted modes should transfer to other, unrelated tasks. If so, global/local processing modes would qualify as metacontrol states that are assumed to regulate processing dilemmas, like persistence/flexibility, exploitation/exploration, or speed/accuracy (Goschke, 2000). Given increasing rates of nonreplications of previously demonstrated far transfer from prime tasks that are likely to induce a particular global or local processing bias to logically and temporally unrelated probe tasks, we tested whether near and far transfer can be demonstrated under conditions that should be optimal for such transfer.

Effects of Maternal Anxiety Disorders on Infant Self-Comforting Behaviors: The Role of Maternal Bonding, Infant Gender and Age.

Background/aims: We investigated the links between maternal bonding, maternal anxiety disorders, and infant self-comforting behaviors. Furthermore, we looked at the moderating roles of infant gender and age.

Methods: Our sample (n = 69) comprised 28 mothers with an anxiety disorder (according to DSM-IV criteria) and 41 controls, each with their 2.

Outcome producing potential influences twelve-month-olds' interpretation of a novel action as goal-directed.

Learning about a novel, goal-directed action is a complex process. It requires identifying the outcome of the action and linking the action to its outcome for later use in new situations to predict the action or to anticipate its outcome. We investigated the hypothesis that linking a novel action to a salient change in the environment is critical for infants to assign a goal to the novel action.

From outcome prediction to action selection: developmental change in the role of action-effect bindings.

Ideomotor theory considers bidirectional action-effect associations to be the fundamental building blocks for intentional action. The present study employed a novel pupillometric and oculomotor paradigm to study developmental changes in the role of action-effects in the acquisition of voluntary action. Our findings suggest that both 7- and 12-month-olds (and adults) can use acquired action-effect bindings to predict action outcomes but only 12-month-olds (and adults) showed evidence for employing action-effects to select actions.

Explicit learning of arbitrary and non-arbitrary action-effect relations in adults and 4-year-olds.

Ideomotor theories claim that carrying out a movement that produces a perceivable effect creates a bidirectional association between the two, which can then be used by action control processes to retrieve the associated action by anticipating its outcome. Previous implicit-learning studies have shown that practice renders novel but action-contingent stimuli effective retrieval cues of the action they used to follow, suggesting that experiencing sequences of actions and effects creates bidirectional action-effect associations. We investigated whether action-effect associations are also acquired under explicit learning conditions and whether familiar action-effect relations (such as between a trumpet and a trumpet sound) are learned the same way as novel, arbitrary relations are.

Primacy of information about means selection over outcome selection in goal attribution by infants.

It has been shown that, when observing an action, infants can rely on either outcome selection information (i.e., actions that express a choice between potential outcomes) or means selection information (i.

Evidence for a unitary goal concept in 12-month-old infants.

We investigated whether infants can transfer their goal attribution between situations that contain different types of information about the goal. We found that 12-month-olds who had attributed a goal based on the causal efficacy of a means-end action generated expectations about the actor's action in another scenario in which the actor could choose between alternative outcomes. This finding suggests that, by 12 months, infants possess a unitary concept of goal.

Where do action goals come from? Evidence for spontaneous action-effect binding in infants.

One of the great questions in psychology concerns how we develop to become intentional agents. Ideomotor theory suggests that intentional actions depend on, and emerge from the automatic acquisition of bidirectional action-effect associations: perceiving an action-effect sequence creates an integrated representation that can be employed for action control in the opposite order, selecting an action by anticipating its effect. We provide first evidence for the spontaneous acquisition of bidirectional action-effect associations in 9- 12-, and 18-month-olds, suggesting that the mechanism underlying action-effect integration is in place at the latest around 9 months of age.