Ostensive Cues Research Articles

Ostensive cues in mother-toddler interaction

Ostensive cues in mother-toddler interaction

Two-year-old children differentiate test questions from genuine questions

Children are frequently confronted with so-called 'test questions'. While genuine questions are requests for missing information, test questions ask for information obviously already known to the questioner. In this study we explored whether two-year-old children respond differentially to one and the same question used as either a genuine question or as a test question based on the situation (playful game versus serious task) and attitude (playful ostensive cues versus not). Results indicated that children responded to questions differently on the basis of the situation but not the expressed attitude of the questioner. Two-year-old children thus understand something of the very special communicative intentions behind test questions.

Comment on “Differential Sensitivity to Human Communication in Dogs, Wolves, and Human Infants”

Topál et al. (Reports, 4 September 2009, p. 1269) showed that dogs, like infants but unlike wolves, make perseverative search errors that can be explained by the use of ostensive cues from the experimenter. We suggest that a simpler learning process, local enhancement, can account for errors made by dogs.

Taking the language stance in a material world

This paper investigates a special kind of social meaning-making manifest in how we experience static objects and properties of our everyday world. This happens, for example, when we recognize objects like vacuum cleaners, sliced tomatoes, and sneakers as placed in special sites in the environment. Given the compositional features of such images, we see them as designed to accomplish communicative functions. It is argued that object configurations of this kind are recognized as externalized ostensive cues. They are seen as having been created with the intention of setting off an intersubjective mode of perception. This significantly changes the perceiver’s semiotic exploration of the scene. From a ‘private’ mode of sense-making mostly structured by reference to episodic, autobiographical experiential content, the perceiver takes a language stance. In other words, the perceiver adopts a qualitatively different meaning-constructing strategy in dealing with such images. Defending this claim, we present evidence from an empirical investigation of 20 participants’ construals of photographic images depicting everyday static objects. We show that a subset of these object configurations (signals) evoke a special kind of socially responsive attitude as manifested in participants’ introspective reports. The importance of these findings is brought out by discussion of parallels in neuro-cognitive work and how ostensive cues influence infant behavior.

The effect of ostensive cues on dogs’ performance in a manipulative social learning task

In contrast to animal social learning (e.g. dogs learning from observing another dog), humans typically teach by attracting the attention of the learner. Also during the training of dogs, humans tend to attract their attention in a similar way. Here, we investigated dogs’ ability to learn both from a dog and a human demonstrator in a manipulative task, where the models demonstrated which part of a box to manipulate in order to get a food reward. We varied the communicative context both during the dog and during the human demonstration comparably: a second experimenter directed the attention of the subjects to the model (dog/human ostensive demonstration) or remained silent (dog/human non-ostensive demonstration). Moreover, we investigated whether the training level of the dogs (well-trained vs. untrained) affected how the dogs performed in the manipulative tasks after the different demonstrations. We found that better trained dogs showed significantly better problem solving abilities. They paid more attention to the human demonstration than to the dog model, whereas such a difference in attentiveness of the less trained dogs was not found. Despite slight differences in paying attention to the different demonstrators, the presence of human or the dog demonstrators exerted equally effectiveness on the test performance of the dogs. However, the effectiveness of the demonstrations was significantly reduced if ostensive cues were given during the demonstrations by a second experimenter. Analysis of attentiveness and activity of the observer dogs during the demonstrations indicates that the reason for this negative effect was a combination of distracted attention paid to the demonstration and a higher level of excitement in the ostensive than in the non-ostensive demonstrations. This study suggests that third party communication during demonstration attracts dogs’ attention to the communicator instead of paying close attention to the model. We suggest that precise timing and synchronization of attention-calling and demonstration is necessary to avoid this distracting effect.

Dogs, Canis familiaris, fail to copy intransitive actions in third-party contextual imitation tasks

Contextual imitation of intransitive actions within a third-party copying setting was tested in 180 household dogs. A demonstrator dog, in sight of observer dogs, performed one of two trained actions upon hearing verbal commands given by an experimenter. Observer dogs were later tested to see whether they produced more target actions than control groups who had not seen demonstrations of those actions. In all conditions, except one, the demonstrated actions had been previously trained in the observer dogs by their owners, but had been attached to a different verbal command to that used in our study. For these ‘pretrained’ actions we further investigated whether reward contingency, the relationship of the dog to the human experimenter and ostensive cues had an effect. In no condition did we find any contextual imitation. A subsample of all tested dogs had, during their lifetimes, received extensive training in a diverse range of tasks outside of social learning, but this background similarly did not lead to contextual imitation. We conclude that dogs, even when highly trained, fail to show evidence of contextual imitation for intransitive actions within a third-party copying paradigm.

Gaze Following in Human Infants Depends on Communicative Signals

Humans are extremely sensitive to ostensive signals, like eye contact or having their name called, that indicate someone's communicative intention toward them [1-3]. Infants also pay attention to these signals [4-6], but it is unknown whether they appreciate their significance in the initiation of communicative acts. In two experiments, we employed video presentation of an actor turning toward one of two objects and recorded infants' gaze-following behavior [7-13] with eye-tracking techniques [11, 12]. We found that 6-month-old infants followed the adult's gaze (a potential communicative-referential signal) toward an object only when such an act is preceded by ostensive cues such as direct gaze (experiment 1) and infant-directed speech (experiment 2). Such a link between the presence of ostensive signals and gaze following suggests that this behavior serves a functional role in assisting infants to effectively respond to referential communication directed to them. Whereas gaze following in many nonhuman species supports social information gathering [14-18], in humans it initially appears to reflect the expectation of a more active, communicative role from the information source.

Puncture porencephaly

Young children are sensitive to ostensive cues (OC), a specific set of communication signals which denote a learning context. This endows human communication with a protocol – termed natural pedagogy – adapted to transmit knowledge. It remains unknown whether children spontaneously communicate in this protocol. Here, we show that children display a broad repertoire of ostensive signals during pedagogically relevant moments of their discourse. We introduce an experimental setup where an adult actor plays erroneously a simple inference game which the child has previously learned how to play. This naturally shifts the child from a student to a teacher's role in the educational dialog. In Study 1 (n = 31), we examine children's use of ostensive cues and gestures as they develop their explanations (3–5 and 6–8-years old). We demonstrate that all children use non-verbal behaviors specifically during moments of pedagogical relevance and the dynamics’ use of ostensive signals change through childhood. In Study 2 (n = 16), the adult pupil minimizes all reception to non-linguistic OC and gestures. This resulted in a decrease of children's frequency of OC during pedagogical episodes but did not affect other gesturing behavior. In Study 3 (n = 15) we show that decreasing ostension during children's history of instruction does not decrease their own ostension while teaching. This rejects the hypothesis that children teach by simple imitation of their learning experience and showed instead, that they can diagnose the sources of the adult pupil's failure and adjust their own teaching accordingly. Together, these results demonstrate that children are spontaneously tuned in the emitter side of natural pedagogy.