Abstract
We report evidence that 29-month-old toddlers and 10-month-old preverbal infants discriminate between two agents: a pro-social agent, who performs a positive (comforting) action on a human patient and a negative (harmful) action on an inanimate object, and an anti-social agent, who does the converse. The evidence shows that they prefer the former to the latter even though the agents perform the same bodily movements. Given that humans can cause physical harm to their conspecifics, we discuss this finding in light of the likely adaptive value of the ability to detect harmful human agents.
Highlights
Humans seem unique in their ability to help, cooperate and communicate with their conspecifics [1,2], and to harm, defect and deceive them [3,4]
Recent developmental studies indicate that infants do represent agents’ actions, goals and intentions [5,6,7], and evaluate them: using non-verbal dependent measures, several studies have showed that young toddlers and even preverbal infants are able to evaluate some actions as either positive or negative and express social preferences towards agents as a function of the valence of their actions
There were no effects of counterbalancing factor on either the pro-social or anti-social agents we found that the Absolute Valence Index (AVI) obtained for the prosocial agent was slightly negative but not significantly different from zero (AVI = 20.01, SE = 0.09, F(1,27),1, p.0.1, gp2 = 0.001) whereas, the AVI obtained for the anti-social agent was negative and significantly below zero (AVI = 20.19, SE = 0.09, F(1,27) = 6.29, p,.05, gp2 = .34)
Summary
Humans seem unique in their ability to help, cooperate and communicate with their conspecifics [1,2], and to harm, defect and deceive them [3,4]. The ability to discriminate potentially benevolent from malevolent agents would seem important for survival, in adulthood and in early childhood or even infancy Congruent with this view, recent developmental studies indicate that infants do represent agents’ actions, goals and intentions [5,6,7], and evaluate them: using non-verbal dependent measures, several studies have showed that young toddlers and even preverbal infants are able to evaluate some actions as either positive or negative and express social preferences towards agents as a function of the valence of their actions. Infants habituated to a positive action, but not to a negative action, showed a dishabituation response (as measured by looking times), when presented with a novel instance of a negative action (hitting). This suggests that 52week-old infants are able to categorize actions along their positive or negative valence across differences in the low-level kinematic characteristics of the actions
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