Preverbal Infants Research Articles

Preverbal infants utilize cross-modal semantic congruency in artificial grammar acquisition

Learning in a multisensory world is challenging as the information from different sensory dimensions may be inconsistent and confusing. By adulthood, learners optimally integrate bimodal (e.g. audio-visual, AV) stimulation by both low-level (e.g. temporal synchrony) and high-level (e.g. semantic congruency) properties of the stimuli to boost learning outcomes. However, it is unclear how this capacity emerges and develops. To approach this question, we examined whether preverbal infants were capable of utilizing high-level properties with grammar-like rule acquisition. In three experiments, we habituated pre-linguistic infants with an audio-visual (AV) temporal sequence that resembled a grammar-like rule (A-A-B). We varied the cross-modal semantic congruence of the AV stimuli (Exp 1: congruent syllables/faces; Exp 2: incongruent syllables/shapes; Exp 3: incongruent beeps/faces) while all the other low-level properties (e.g. temporal synchrony, sensory energy) were constant. Eight- to ten-month-old infants only learned the grammar-like rule from AV congruent stimuli pairs (Exp 1), not from incongruent AV pairs (Exp 2, 3). Our results show that similar to adults, preverbal infants’ learning is influenced by a high-level multisensory integration gating system, pointing to a perceptual origin of bimodal learning advantage that was not previously acknowledged.

Szacunek, dystans, inkluzja. Paleta interaktywnych ćwiczeń do lekcji etyki (grupa wiekowa 10–14 lat)

Authentic feelings like respect and similar moral emotions already start to develop in preverbal infants. However, our schooling systems offer only very few opportunities to train respectful behavior. Marsal, Dobashi, and Nowak introduce four interactive exercices in order to implement them in the moral and democratic education. All exercices are based on Martens’ Five Finger Method and on the didactic experiences made by authors in Germany, Japan, and Poland too.

Negativity bias in infants' expectations about agents' dispositions.

This study investigated 6- and 10-month-old infants' abilities to infer others' preferences based on social interactions using looking time and choice measures. Infants were randomly assigned to either a helping/neutral or hindering/neutral condition. Those in the helping/neutral condition were first familiarized with a helping event, in which an agent helped a circle climb a hill, and a neutral event, in which another agent followed the same path as the helping agent but had no interaction with the circle. During the test phase, the circle approached either the helper or the neutral agent. In the hindering/neutral condition, the infants were familiarized with a hindering event, in which an agent hindered the circle from reaching the top of the hill, and a neutral event, in which another agent followed the same path as the hindering agent but had no interaction with the circle. During the test phase, the circle approached either the hinderer or the neutral agent. For the looking-time measure, infants in the hindering/neutral condition looked reliably longer at the approach-hinderer than at the approach-neutral agent event, whereas those in the helping/neutral condition looked for equal amounts of time at both test events. These results suggest that the infants expected the circle to avoid the hinderer but did not expect it to approach the helper. In the choice task, infants chose the helper more often than the neutral agent and the neutral agent more often than the hinderer, suggesting an ability to generate their own preferences for a particular agent based on the valence of helping and hindering actions. This research demonstrates infants' sensitivity to the moral valence of agents' social interactions, which may serve as a foundation for advanced socio-moral reasoning. Statement of contribution What is already known on this subject? Research on infants' ability in social evaluation has established that even preverbal infants can distinguish between positive and negative social interactions. Infants as young as 6months of age can distinguish between helping and hindering actions and can generate their own preference towards helpful agents. What does this study add? The present study sheds light on infants' ability to infer a third-party's preference, which is a more challenging task for the infants than generating their own preference. Specifically, 6- and 10-month-old infants could infer others' preference for the neutral agent over the hinderer. Such results demonstrate infants' sensitivity to the moral valence of agents' social interactions and provide an evidence of negativity bias in social evaluation.

Pre-verbal infants perceive emotional facial expressions categorically

ABSTRACTAdults perceive emotional expressions categorically, with discrimination being faster and more accurate between expressions from different emotion categories (i.e. blends with two different predominant emotions) than between two stimuli from the same category (i.e. blends with the same predominant emotion). The current study sought to test whether facial expressions of happiness and fear are perceived categorically by pre-verbal infants, using a new stimulus set that was shown to yield categorical perception in adult observers (Experiments 1 and 2). These stimuli were then used with 7-month-old infants (N = 34) using a habituation and visual preference paradigm (Experiment 3). Infants were first habituated to an expression of one emotion, then presented with the same expression paired with a novel expression either from the same emotion category or from a different emotion category. After habituation to fear, infants displayed a novelty preference for pairs of between-category expressions, but not within-category ones, showing categorical perception. However, infants showed no novelty preference when they were habituated to happiness. Our findings provide evidence for categorical perception of emotional expressions in pre-verbal infants, while the asymmetrical effect challenges the notion of a bias towards negative information in this age group.

Functional Organization of the Temporal-Parietal Junction for Theory of Mind in Preverbal Infants: A Near-Infrared Spectroscopy Study.

Successful human social life requires imagining what others believe or think to understand and predict behavior. This ability, often referred to as theory of mind (ToM), reliably engages a specialized network of temporal and prefrontal brain regions in older children and adults, including selective recruitment of the temporal-parietal junction (TPJ). To date, how and when this specialized brain organization for ToM arises is unknown due to limitations in functional neuroimaging at younger ages. Here, we used the emerging technique of functional near-infrared spectroscopy to measure the functional brain response across parietal, temporal, and prefrontal regions in 7-month-old male and female infants as they viewed different video scenarios of a person searching for a hidden object. Over different conditions, we manipulated whether the person held an accurate (true) or inaccurate (false) belief about the location of the hidden object in the videos. In two separate experiments, we observed that activity from the TPJ, but not other temporal and prefrontal regions, spontaneously tracked with the beliefs of the other person, responding more during scenarios when the other person's belief regarding the location of the object was false compared with scenarios when her belief was true. These results mirror those obtained with adults to show that the TPJ already shows some functional organization relevant to high-level social cognition by around 7 months of age. Furthermore, these results suggest that infants may draw on similar core mechanisms to implicitly track beliefs, as adults do when reasoning explicitly about them.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Humans selectively engage a network of brain regions, including the temporal-parietal junction (TPJ), to track what others think, an ability referred to as theory of mind. How and when this specialized brain organization for high-level social cognition arises is unknown. Using the emerging technique of near-infrared spectroscopy with 7-month-old infants, we observed that activity of the TPJ, but not other temporal and frontal regions, distinguished between scenarios when another person's belief about the location of the object was false compared with scenarios when the belief was true. These results suggest that a basic neural architecture to understand and predict the actions of others based on their beliefs may be present from the first year of life.

Precursors of logical reasoning in preverbal human infants.

Infants are able to entertain hypotheses about complex events and to modify them rationally when faced with inconsistent evidence. These capacities suggest that infants can use elementary logical representations to frame and prune hypotheses. By presenting scenes containing ambiguities about the identity of an object, here we show that 12- and 19-month-old infants look longer at outcomes that are inconsistent with a logical inference necessary to resolve such ambiguities. At the moment of a potential deduction, infants' pupils dilated, and their eyes moved toward the ambiguous object when inferences could be computed, in contrast to transparent scenes not requiring inferences to identify the object. These oculomotor markers resembled those of adults inspecting similar scenes, suggesting that intuitive and stable logical structures involved in the interpretation of dynamic scenes may be part of the fabric of the human mind.

The infant as philosopher

Cognitive Science Visual behaviors, such as a shift in one's gaze or a prolonged stare, can be diagnostic of internal thoughts. Cesana-Arlotti et al. used these measures to demonstrate that preverbal infants can formulate a logical structure called a disjunctive syllogism (see the Perspective by Halberda). That is, if A or B is true, and A is false, then B must be true. Presenting infants with scenes where the outcome revealed B to be false evoked looks of surprise. Science , this issue p. [1263][1]; see also p. [1214][2] [1]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.aao3539 [2]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.aas9183

From the Pre-Verbal Infant to the Non-Verbal Adult: Increasing Your Delirium Recognition and Treatment Skill Set in Challenging Pediatric and Adult Patients (TH315)

From the Pre-Verbal Infant to the Non-Verbal Adult: Increasing Your Delirium Recognition and Treatment Skill Set in Challenging Pediatric and Adult Patients (TH315)

The Origins of Verb Learning: Preverbal and Postverbal Infants' Learning of Word-Action Relations.

This experiment examined English- or Spanish-learning preverbal (8-9 months, n = 32) and postverbal (12-14 months, n = 40) infants' learning of word-action pairings prior to and after the transition to verb comprehension and its relation to naturally learned vocabulary. Infants of both verbal levels were first habituated to 2 dynamic video displays of novel word-action pairings, the words /wem/ or /bæf/, spoken synchronously with an adult shaking or looming an object, and tested with interchanged (switched) versus same word-action pairings. Mothers of the postverbal infants were asked to report on their infants' vocabulary on the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (Fenson et al., 1994). The preverbal infants looked longer to the switched relative to same pairings, suggesting word-action mapping, but not the postverbal infants. Mothers of the postverbal infants reported a noun bias on the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories; infants learned more nouns than verbs in the natural environment. Further analyses revealed marginal word-action mapping in postverbal infants who learned fewer nouns and only comprehended verbs (post-verb comprehension), but not in those who learned more nouns and also produced verbs (post-verb production). These findings on verb learning from inside and outside the laboratory suggest a developmental shift from domain-general to language-specific mechanisms. Long before they talk, infants learning a noun-dominant language learn synchronous word-action relations. As a postverbal language-specific noun bias develops, this learning temporarily diminishes. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.5592637.

The Temporal Dimensions in the First Year of Life

Time is a multifaceted concept that is critical in our cognitive lives and can refer, among others, to the period that lapses between the initial encounter with a stimulus and its posterior recognition, as well as to the specific duration of a certain event. In the first part of this paper, we will review studies that explain the involvement of the temporal dimension in the processing of sensory information, in the form of a temporal delay that impacts the accuracy of information processing. We will review studies that investigate the time intervals required to encode, retain, and remember a stimulus across sensory modalities in preverbal infants. In the second part, we will review studies that examine preverbal infants’ ability to encode the duration and distinguish events. In particular, we will discuss recent studies that show how the ability to recognize the timing of events in infants and newborns parallels, and is related to, their ability to compute other quantitative dimensions, such as number and space.

Probing the depth of infants' theory of mind: disunity in performance across paradigms.

There is currently a hot debate in the literature regarding whether or not infants have a true theory of mind (ToM) understanding. According to the mentalistic view, infants possess the same false belief understanding that older children have but their competence is masked by task demands. On the other hand, others have proposed that preverbal infants are incapable of mental state attribution and simply respond to superficial features of the events in spontaneous-responses tasks. In the current study, we aimed to clarify the nature of infants' performance in tasks designed to assess implicit theory of mind (ToM) by adopting a within-subject design that involved testing 18-month-old infants on two batteries of tasks measuring the same four ToM constructs (intention, desire, true belief, and false belief). One battery included tasks based on the violation-of- expectation (VOE) procedure, whereas the other set of tasks was based on the interactive, helping procedure. Replication of the original findings varied across tasks, due to methodological changes and the use of a within-subject design. Convergent validity was examined by comparing performance on VOE and interactive tasks that are considered to be measures of the same theory of mind concept. The results revealed no significant relations between performance on the pairs of tasks for any of the four ToM constructs measured. This pattern of results is discussed in terms of current conflicting accounts of infants' performance on implicit ToM tasks. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3vqfe_zdhA&feature=youtu.be.

Using individual functional channels of interest to study cortical development with fNIRS.

Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is a noninvasive neuroimaging technique that could be uniquely effective for investigating cortical function in human infants. However, prior efforts have been hampered by the difficulty of aligning arrays of fNIRS optodes placed on the scalp to anatomical or functional regions of underlying cortex. This challenge can be addressed by identifying channels of interest in individual participants, and then testing the reliability of those channels' response profiles in independent data. Using this approach, cortical regions with preferential responses to faces versus scenes, and to scenes versus faces, were observed reliably in both adults and infants. By contrast, standard analysis techniques did not reliably identify significant responses to both categories in either age group. These results reveal scene-responsive regions, and confirm face-responsive regions, in preverbal infants. More generally, the analysis approach will be a robust and sensitive tool for future characterization of the early functional development of the human brain.

Early maternal mirroring predicts infant motor system activation during facial expression observation

Processing facial expressions is an essential component of social interaction, especially for preverbal infants. In human adults and monkeys, this process involves the motor system, with a neural matching mechanism believed to couple self- and other-generated facial gestures. Here, we used electroencephalography to demonstrate recruitment of the human motor system during observation and execution of facial expressions in nine-month-old infants, implicating this system in facial expression processing from a very young age. Notably, examination of early video-recorded mother-infant interactions supported the common, but as yet untested, hypothesis that maternal mirroring of infant facial gestures is central to the development of a neural matching mechanism for these gestures. Specifically, the extent to which mothers mirrored infant facial expressions at two months postpartum predicted infant motor system activity during observation of the same expressions at nine months. This suggests that maternal mirroring strengthens mappings between visual and motor representations of facial gestures, which increases infant neural sensitivity to particularly relevant cues in the early social environment.

Preschoolers’ social and moral judgments of third-party helpers and hinderers align with infants’ social evaluations

Two experiments explored preschoolers’ social preferences and moral judgments of prosocial and antisocial others. In Experiment 1, 3- to 5-year-olds (N=74) observed helping and hindering scenarios previously used to explore sociomoral evaluation in preverbal infants. Whereas 3-year-olds in Experiment 1 did not reliably distinguish between the helper and hinderer when reporting social preferences or moral judgments, both 4- and 5-year-olds preferred the helper, judged the helper to be “nicer” than the hinderer, selectively allocated punishment to the hinderer, and were able to justify their punishment allocations. A simplified procedure and the addition of comprehension questions in Experiment 2 (N=24) improved 3-year-olds’ performance, suggestive that their performance in Experiment 1 was likely due to processing or memory difficulties rather than an inability to engage in explicit social and moral evaluation. These studies reveal that young children readily interpret helping and hindering scenarios as socially and morally relevant.

Social interaction facilitates word learning in preverbal infants: Word–object mapping and word segmentation

In natural settings, infants learn spoken language with the aid of a caregiver who explicitly provides social signals. Although previous studies have demonstrated that young infants are sensitive to these signals that facilitate language development, the impact of real-life interactions on early word segmentation and word–object mapping remains elusive. We tested whether infants aged 5–6 months and 9–10 months could segment a word from continuous speech and acquire a word–object relation in an ecologically valid setting. In Experiment 1, infants were exposed to a live tutor, while in Experiment 2, another group of infants were exposed to a televised tutor. Results indicate that both younger and older infants were capable of segmenting a word and learning a word–object association only when the stimuli were derived from a live tutor in a natural manner, suggesting that real-life interaction enhances the learning of spoken words in preverbal infants.

Paternal questioning as a component of innate intersubjectivity in early infancy

ABSTRACTI investigated the emotional coordination (matching, synchrony, completion and attunement) between infant and paternal facial expressions of emotion in the course of paternal questions addressed to infants during their spontaneous dyadic interaction. Eleven infant–father dyads were observed during their natural interactions at home from the second to the sixth month of life. Within well-defined units and subunits of analysis, microanalysis of infant and paternal facial expressions of emotion according to the type, the frequency, the valence and the intensity of them provided evidence of emotional coordination accompanying paternal questions to preverbal infants. These results will be interpreted in the frame of the theory of innate intersubjectivity.

Infants learn better from left to right: a directional bias in infants\u2019 sequence learning

A wealth of studies show that human adults map ordered information onto a directional spatial continuum. We asked whether mapping ordinal information into a directional space constitutes an early predisposition, already functional prior to the acquisition of symbolic knowledge and language. While it is known that preverbal infants represent numerical order along a left-to-right spatial continuum, no studies have investigated yet whether infants, like adults, organize any kind of ordinal information onto a directional space. We investigated whether 7-month-olds’ ability to learn high-order rule-like patterns from visual sequences of geometric shapes was affected by the spatial orientation of the sequences (left-to-right vs. right-to-left). Results showed that infants readily learn rule-like patterns when visual sequences were presented from left to right, but not when presented from right to left. This result provides evidence that spatial orientation critically determines preverbal infants’ ability to perceive and learn ordered information in visual sequences, opening to the idea that a left-to-right spatially organized mental representation of ordered dimensions might be rooted in biologically-determined constraints on human brain development.

Stern on “Self”

ABSTRACTSelf is a notion of common-sense psychology that several schools of psychoanalysis have built into their theories. Stern explores and expands its meaning, tracing its development back to birth and even earlier, and outlining how the psychological development of the preverbal infant contributes to its evolution. In the process, Stern discusses two perspectives on preverbal infant psychology—that of the observational empiricist developmental psychologist, and that of the reconstructing psychoanalytic clinician working from the subjective experience of adult patients, and what each might contribute to the other. His thinking suggests the importance of nonverbal models of infant (and, eventually, adult) subjective experience.

Attentional processes, not implicit mentalizing, mediate performance in a perspective-taking task: Evidence from stimulation of the temporoparietal junction

Mentalizing is a fundamental process underpinning human social interaction. Claims of the existence of ‘implicit mentalizing’ represent a fundamental shift in our understanding of this important skill, suggesting that preverbal infants and even animals may be capable of mentalizing. One of the most influential tasks supporting such claims in adults is the dot perspective-taking task, but demonstrations of similar performance on this task for mentalistic and non-mentalistic stimuli have led to the suggestion that this task in fact measures domain-general processes, rather than implicit mentalizing. A mentalizing explanation was supported by fMRI data claiming to show greater activation of brain areas involved in mentalizing, including right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ), when participants made self-perspective judgements in a mentalistic, but not in a non-mentalistic condition, an interpretation subsequently challenged. Here we provide the first causal test of the mentalizing claim using disruptive transcranial magnetic stimulation of rTPJ during self-perspective judgements. We found no evidence for a distinction between mentalistic and non-mentalistic stimuli: stimulation of rTPJ impaired performance on all self-perspective trials, regardless of the mentalistic/non-mentalistic nature of the stimulus. Our data support a domain-general attentional interpretation of performance on the dot perspective-taking task, a role which is subserved by the rTPJ.

Foundations of Reasoning About Social Dominance

AbstractUnderstanding the factors that shape the social landscape is essential for living in a group, where dominant individuals often have greater control over and access to desired resources such as food and mates. Recently, researchers have demonstrated that preverbal infants, similar to their nonhuman primate relatives, already possess the cognitive schemas necessary to represent social dominance in relationships, using ecologically relevant cues such as relative physical size and group size. In this article, we discuss the phylogenetic and ontogenetic origins of infants’ and children's capacity to represent social dominance in relationships and hierarchies, and examine how these initial representations are enriched across early childhood.