Hands convey important social information, such as an individual's emotions, goals, and desires, are used to direct attention through pointing, and are a major organ for haptic perception. However, very little is known about infants' representation of human hands. In Experiment 1, infants tested in a familiarization/novelty preference task…

This research investigated whether the perception of social-causal relation alone triggers both infants' evaluation processes and expectations about the social preferences of informed third parties. Three experiments were carried out, using the violation of expectation (VoE) paradigm. During the familiarization phase, infants saw events in which…

Previous studies have proposed that humans may be born with mechanisms that attend to conspecifics. However, as previous studies have relied on stimuli featuring human adults, it remains unclear whether infants attend only to adult humans or to the entire human species. We found that 1-month-old infants (n = 23) were able to differentiate between…

Research in the past decades has investigated the time course of the acquisition of physical knowledge in early development in much detail. However, few is known about the motives that actually lead infants to interact with the objects of their physical world. The research presented here investigated in two experiments if 11-month-old infants'…