Infants use attention but not emotions to predict others' actions

Abstract

Phillips et al. (2002) suggest that by 12-14 months, infants can use a person's emotional and attentional cues to predict that person's actions. However, this work was conducted using only positive emotions, which is problematic because attention and positive emotions lead to the same prediction about a person's actions, thus leaving unclear whether infants made predictions based upon attention and emotion or attention alone. To get around this problem, we used both positive and negative emotions in a looking-time paradigm to investigate whether 14-month-old infants can use emotional cues to predict a person's actions. The findings suggest that infants used attentional but not emotional cues as predictors. We argue that while 14-month-olds can use another person's emotion cues to modify their own behavior (as in social referencing situations), they do not yet use them robustly to predict the other's behavior.

Figure 1

Duration of looks to the four happy versus the four disgust familiarization events as well as the average duration of looks to all four familiarization events. *p < .05.

Figure 2

Average duration of looks to attended versus unattended test events by infants who saw an attended event first versus infants who saw an unattended event first. *p < .05.

Figure 3

Recovery in infants’ looking from the last familiarization to the first attended versus unattended trial, in the happy condition (top) and disgust condition (bottom). Note that only infants who habituated are included in the graph of the disgust condition. *: p < .05.