Preverbal Infants Use Object Features and Motion Cues in Social Learning

Studies have shown preverbal infants possess the ability to learn social rules presented in complex perceptual environment, but little is known about how they do it. We investigated the relative contribution of two perceptual cues in social learning. Three groups of six- to twelve-month-old infants were habituated to repeated events in which two agents helped or hindered a climber by pushing it up or down a hill, and who subsequently laughed (when helped) or cried.(when hindered). The three groups then received a test dishabituating stimulus such that for group 1, the climber cried when pushed up the hill and laughed when pushed down; for group 2, the identities of the agents (as defined by geometric shape and color) were reversed; for group 3, the agents kept their identities but reversed their pushing direction. We found infants looked significantly longer in all three dishabituating conditions. The results from group 1 suggest that infants successfully associated the social events with consequential emotions. The discriminability in group 2 and 3 suggests that simple motion direction and complex object (agent identity) cues are both effective for emotion-related social learning.