A growing body of literature has established longitudinal associations between key social cognitive capacities emerging in infancy and children's subsequent theory of mind. However, existing work is limited by modest sample sizes, narrow infant measures, and theory of mind assessments with restricted variability and generalizability. The current…

Eye tracking is widely used in developmental research to measure infants' looking behavior before, during, or after particular events and can provide a measure of real-time processing. However, the dynamic time course of infants' looking behaviors is rarely analyzed. Instead, eye tracking data is often averaged within a large window or is…

A live video was used to study the development of visual self-recognition in a cross-sectional sample of 152 typically developing French children aged between 15 months to 6 years. Three reactions to a mark placed on the child's cheek without their knowledge were studied: the touch of the mark with their hand, the ocular responsiveness to the mark…

From early in life, infants synchronize with others on a physiological level, a process thought to underlie social connections and group cohesion. This synchronization is seen, for example, when their pupils dilate in response to observing another person with dilated pupils -- known as "pupillary contagion." There is mixed evidence on…

Fourteen-month-olds selectively imitated a sub-efficient means (illuminating a lightbox by a head-touch) when this was modeled by linguistic ingroup members in video-demonstrations. A follow-up study with slightly older infants, however, could replicate this effect only in a video-demonstration context. Hence it still remains unclear whether…

From a perceptual learning perspective, infants use social information (like gaze direction) in a similar way as other information in our physical environment (like object movements) to specify action possibilities. In the current study, we assumed that infants are able to learn an affordance upon observing an adult failing to act out that…

The development of theory of mind (ToM) in infancy has been mainly documented through studies conducted on a single age group with a single task. Very few studies have examined ToM abilities other than false belief, and very few studies have used a within-subjects design. During 2 testing sessions, infants aged 14 and 18 months old were…

Although infants' cognitions about the world must be influenced by experience, little research has directly assessed the relation between everyday experience and infants' visual cognition in the laboratory. Eye-tracking procedures were used to measure 4-month-old infants' eye movements as they visually investigated a series of…

Do young infants understand that pointing gestures allow the pointer to change the information state of a recipient? We used a third-party experimental scenario to examine whether 9- and 11-month-olds understand that a pointer's pointing gesture can inform a recipient about a target object. When the pointer pointed to a target, infants…

Two experiments were conducted to determine if infants attribute false beliefs to others when tested with the violation-of-expectancy procedure. In Experiment 1, the false-belief task was administered to 14- and 18-month-old infants. The procedure was identical to the one used by Onishi and Baillargeon (2005), except that two transparent boxes…

Understanding the actions of others depends on the insight that these actions are structured by intentional relations. In a number of conceptual domains, comparison with familiar instances has been shown to support children's and adults' ability to discern the relational structure of novel instances. Recent evidence suggests that this process…

Fifteen-month-old infants detected a violation when an actor performed an action that did not match her preceding vocal cue: The infants looked reliably longer when the actor expressed a humorous vocal cue followed by a sweet action or expressed a sweet vocal cue followed by a humorous action, than when the vocal cue was followed by a matching…

Warning others is a paradigm case of communicative helping and prospective action understanding. The current study addressed the ontogeny of warning in infants' gestural communication. We found that 12- and 18-month-olds ("n" = 84) spontaneously warned an adult by pointing out to her an aversive object hidden in her way…

This study investigates the importance of object function (action-object-outcome relations) on object individuation in infancy. Five experiments examined the ability of 9.5- and 12-month-old infants to individuate simple geometric objects in a manual search design. Experiments 1 through 4 (12-month-olds, N = 128) provided several combinations of…

In 4 experiments, we examined 16- and 20-month-old infants' understanding of proper names and count nouns. In each experiment, infants were taught a novel word modeled linguistically as either a proper name (e.g., "DAXY") or a count noun (e.g., "a DAXY") for a stuffed animal shown on a puppet stage. This animal was moved to a new location on the…