Abstract
The aim of this study is to investigate how ostensive cues modify infants’ visual attention to task demonstration, and the extent to which this enhances the performance in an imitative learning task. We hypothesized that ostensive cues would help orient infants’ attention toward relevant parts of the demonstration. We investigated the looking behavior of 41 10-month-old infants while observing an adult demonstrating a novel target action after having either provided ostensive cues or not. Infants’ looking behavior was measured using an eye tracker. Two areas of interest were analyzed: the targeted object and the adult’s face. Infants’ performance after demonstration was also analyzed. The results show that infants’ looking behavior varied across groups. When ostensive cues were not provided, infants looked mainly at the experimenter’s face. However, when ostensive cues were provided, infants oriented their attention toward the targeted object. These results suggest that ostensive cues help infants orient their attention toward task-relevant parts of the scene. Surprisingly, infants in the non-ostensive group improved their performance faster after demonstration than infants in the ostensive group. These results are discussed in terms of a video effect and dissociation between separate cognitive systems for social and non-social cognition.
Highlights
Over the last five years, an emerging body of research has been showing how infants’ imitative learning capacities are enhanced when the experimenter communicates with the infant before or during the demonstration of a target action
The communication used in these studies can be social interaction unrelated to the task (Nielsen, Simcock, & Jenkins, 2008) or ostensive cues directly related to the target action (Brugger, Lariviere, Mumm, & Bushnell, 2007; Carpenter, Call, & Tomasello, 2005; Esseily, Rat-Fischer, O’Regan, & Fagard, 2013; Southgate, Chevallier, & Csibra, 2009; Topàl, Gergely, Miklosi, Erdohegyi, & Csibra, 2008)
We found no significant difference in areas of interest (AOI) and OAOI fixations between the three demonstrations, and to simplify the results, we present the mean AOI and OAOI fixations over the three demonstrations in the first trial
Summary
Over the last five years, an emerging body of research has been showing how infants’ imitative learning capacities are enhanced when the experimenter communicates with the infant before or during the demonstration of a target action. Some studies have found that infants primarily imitate effective ways of achieving goals, ignoring apparently unnecessary actions unless the demonstrator makes it manifest to them through ostensive cues that these actions are relevant to the task (Brugger, Lariviere, Mumm, & Bushnell, 2007; Carpenter, Call, & Tomasello, 2005; Carpenter, Nagell, & Tomasello, 1998; Gergely, Bekkering, & Kiràly, 2002; Nielsen, 2006; Southgate, Chevallier, & Csibra, 2009). In a slightly different procedure, showing the experimenter’s intention or goal before demonstration of the target action was shown to improve infants’ performance in an imitative learning task (Esseily, Rat-Fischer, O’Regan, & Fagard, 2013).
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