Abstract
In a series of eye-tracking studies, we investigated preverbal infants’ understanding of social exclusion by analyzing their gaze behaviors as they were familiarized with animations depicting social acceptance and explicit or implicit social exclusion. In addition, we implemented preferential reaching and anticipatory looking paradigms to further assess understanding of outcomes. Across all experiments (n = 81), it was found that 7–9 month-old infants exhibited non-random visual scanning and gaze behaviors and responded systematically and above random chance in their choice of character and, to some extent, in their anticipation of the movement of a neutral character during a test trial. Together, the results suggest that not only do preverbal infants follow and understand third party social events, such as acceptance and exclusion, but that they also update their representations of particular characters as events unfold and evaluate characters on the basis of their actions, as well as the consequences of those actions.
Highlights
Social exclusion is a complex and painful experience of human existence
We focused on the distribution of fixations on areas of interest (AOIs; the characters and the group resource shown on-screen) and compared proportions of looking time to primary characters across conditions and outcomes
While 16 infants were intended for analysis in the implicit condition, valid data was only obtained from 13 infants before the study had to be completed due to a time restriction
Summary
Social exclusion is a complex and painful experience of human existence. Owing to the threat that being excluded from social groups poses to one’s sense of belonging, which is important for maintaining health and well-being [1,2,3], and must have posed to ensuring one’s survival in ancestral times [4,5,6], it is not surprising that human adults are attuned and responsive to cues that signal exclusion in various social settings [2,4,7,8]. Humans are thought to develop attachment styles experientially, usually through a repeated pattern of interactions with their primary caregiver as infants [9]. Secure and insecure attachment styles develop as a function of two primitive and basic relational experiences: the physical proximity and the responsiveness of the caregiver during the first year of life [10,11,12] and become stable from around 10 months of age [13,14]. The question of whether preverbal infants younger than 10 months are able to detect and evaluate these relational experiences outside of their caregiver dyads (i.e., as third-party observers of group-level social events) is an interesting one, and has not yet, to our knowledge, been addressed by empirical research
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