Friday, November 22, 2024
11/22/2024
PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT Objectives: Developmental scientists frequently employ the Violation of Expectation (VOE) paradigm to investigate two areas of infant development: cognitive and social-emotional. Cognitive scientists find that infants look at VOEs, while social-emotional researchers find infants smile at VOEs. In addition to conflicting, these findings remain siloed. The two sides also employ different methods suggesting the findings may be methodological artifacts: cognitive researchers present infants with VOEs in which objects appear to behave by themselves, while social-emotion researchers present infants with VOEs in which agents behave with objects. The former may restrict infants to looking simply because the events are out of the range of typical perceptual experience, yet have led to the inference that infants have an innate sense of natural laws. This project will merge these lines of inquiry and extend the dependent measures to include behavioral, affective, and physiological metrics to examine if and how infants distinguish between VOEs, contributing important knowledge about early cognitive and social capacities. Specifically, the project will present infants with VOEs from the cognitive literature but presented using the social-emotional protocol that involves social agents (Specific Aim #1) and repetition (Specific Aim #2), two features that may resolve these problematic discrepancies and explain how infants make sense of VOEs. Design and Methods: In experiment #1, 6-month-olds (N=60) will observe two VOEs taken from the literature (object disappearance & object switch; Baillargeon, 1994a & Dunn & Bremner, 2017, respectively) in which a familiar object (e.g., ball) appears to behave by itself (asocial) or an agent behaves with the object (social) in a 2x2 (social/asocial condition x control/VOE event) mixed factorial design. We expect an interaction effect in which infants exhibit more smiling vs. ,more looking at VOEs performed with or without a social agent, respectively. In experiment #2, another sample of 6-month-olds (N=60) will observe the same VOEs and their corresponding control events (within-s’s factor) as described in experiment #1 but be randomly assigned (between-s’s factor) to single or repeated exposure. We predict more smiling toward VOEs presented with repetition (experimental), and more looking at VOEs without repetition (control). In both experiments we expect smaller ratio of looking and larger ratio of smiling in the social/asocial and repetition/single-exposure conditions, respectively. In both experiments heart rate deceleration is predicted to corroborate visual fixation to VOEs and mean (beats/minute) HR decreases/RSA increases in conjunction with looking and/or smiling.
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