The Development of Anticipatory Smiling

When do infants begin to communicate positive affect about physical objects to their social partners? We examined developmental changes in the timing of smiles during episodes of initiating joint attention that involved an infant gazing between an object and a social partner. Twenty‐six typically developing infants were observed at 8, 10, and 12 months during the Early Social‐Communication Scales, a semistructured assessment for eliciting initiating joint attention and related behaviors. The proportion of infant smiling during initiating joint attention episodes did not change with age, but there was a change in the timing of the smiles. The likelihood of infants smiling at an object and then gazing at the experimenter while smiling (anticipatory smiling) increased between 8 and 10 months and remained stable between 10 and 12 months. The increase in the number of infants who smiled at an object and then made eye contact suggests a developing ability to communicate positive affect about an object.     

Infants' Response to Maternal Mirroring in the Still Face and Replay Tasks

Infants' response to maternal mirroring was investigated in 4‐month‐old infants. Mother–infant dyads participated in the still face and replay tasks. Infants were grouped by those whose mothers did and did not mirror their behavior in the interactive phases of the tasks. In the still face task, infants with maternal mirroring showed more attention, smiling, and positive vocalizations across the phases, although both groups of infants demonstrated the still‐face effect with attention and smiling. Infants' social bidding to the mother during the still‐face phase correlated with mothers' mirroring behavior. In the replay task, infants with maternal mirroring demonstrated carryover effects with smiling; infants without maternal mirroring showed no awareness of change in their mothers' behavior. In both the still face and replay tasks, infants with maternal mirroring were more engaged with their mothers. Results suggest that maternal mirroring of infants' behavior affects infants' detection of, and response to, reciprocal interaction.     

Maternal Depressive Symptoms and 6‐Month‐Old Infants' Sensitivity to Facial Expressions

We examined 6‐month‐old infants' abilities to discriminate smiling and frowning from neutral stimuli. In addition, we assessed the relationship between infants' preferences for varying intensities of smiling and frowning facial expressions and their mothers' history of depressive symptoms. Forty‐six infants were presented pairs of facial expressions, and their preferential looking time was recorded. They also participated in a 3‐min interaction with their mothers for which duration of both mother and infant gazing and smiling were coded. Analyses revealed that the infants reliably discriminated between varying intensities of smiling and frowning facial expressions and a paired neutral expression. In addition, infants' preferences for smiling and frowning expressions were related to self‐reports of maternal depressive symptoms experienced since the birth of the infant. Potential implications for social cognitive development are discussed.     

The Effects of Graded Occlusion on Manual Search and Visual Attention in 5‐ to 8‐Month‐Old Infants

Young infants may be limited in searching for hidden objects because they lack the means‐end motor skill to lift occluders from objects. This account was investigated by presenting 5‐ to 8‐month‐old infants with objects hidden behind transparent, semitransparent, and opaque curtains. If a means—end deficit explains search limitations, then infants should search no more for an object behind a transparent curtain than for objects behind semitransparent or opaque curtains. However, level of occlusion had a significant effect on manual search and visual attention. Infants retrieved and contacted the object more, contacted the curtain more, and looked away less with the transparent curtain than with the semi transparent or opaque curtains. Adding a time delay before allowing search and presenting a distraction after occlusion further depressed infants' behavior. The findings fail to support the means—end deficit hypothesis, but are consistent with the account that young infants lack object permanence.     

Behavior of Infant Chimpanzees During the Night in the First 4 Months of Life: Smiling and Suckling in Relation to Behavioral State

This article reports the behavior of 3 newborn chimpanzees in the first 4 months of life, reared by their mothers and living in a community of 14 chimpanzees in a semi‐natural enriched environment. We focused on spontaneous activity during the night partly because sleeping behavior constitutes an essential part of the infants' activity. Observation during the night also had the advantage of keeping the influence of the mothers' activity as well as the environmental stimulation constant throughout the observation period. We report several interesting findings. Behavioral states defined through overt features such as open or closed eyes were variable during the night, with the rapid eye movement (REM) and non‐REM sleep patterns alternating much as they do in human infants. Although crying is one of the distinctive behavioral states in the case of human infants, the chimpanzee infants did not cry like humans. Suckling behavior was often accompanied by open eyes until the end of the first 2 months. Thereafter, suckling with the eyes closed became more prominent. Although there were no explicit stimuli, the newborns showed neonatal smiling with the eyes closed during REM sleep periods. However, neonatal smiling disappeared within the first 2 months and was replaced by social smiling with open eyes. Taken together, the results suggest a strong similarity between human infants and chimpanzee infants in terms of developmental changes in spontaneous activities at around 2 months of age.     

Effects of Maternal Responsiveness on Infant Responsiveness and Behavior in the Still‐Face Task

The effects of maternal responsiveness on infant responsiveness and behavior in the Still‐Face Task were longitudinally examined through infants' first 3 months. Maternal vocal responsiveness and infant vocal and smiling responsiveness significantly increased when infants were 2 months of age. Mothers showed continuity of individual differences in vocal responsiveness from the infants' newborn period. Maternal responsiveness predicted infant responsiveness within and across sessions. Compared with infants with low‐responsive mothers, infants with high‐responsive mothers were more attentive and affectively engaged during the Still‐Face Task from 1 month of age. Infants with high‐responsive mothers discriminated between the task phases with their smiling at 1 month, a month before infants with low‐responsive mothers did so. Infants in both groups discriminated between the phases with their attention and nondistress vocalizations throughout their first 3 months. Results suggest that maternal responsiveness influences infant responsiveness and facilitates infants' engagement and expectations for social interaction.     

Preference for Dynamic Human Images and Gaze‐Following Abilities in Preterm Infants at 6 and 12 Months of Age: An Eye‐Tracking Study

Preterm children are reported to be at higher risk of social communication problems such as autism spectrum disorder compared with full‐term infants. Although previous studies have suggested that preference for social stimuli in infancy is a possible indicator of later social communication development, little is known about this relation in preterm infants. We examined the gaze behavior of low‐risk preterm and full‐term infants at 6 and 12 months' corrected ages using two types of eye‐tracking tasks, which measured 1) preference for social stimuli by biological motion and human geometric preference and 2) ability to follow another's gaze direction. We found that preterm (compared with full‐term) infants at both 6 and 12 months of age spent less time looking toward dynamic human images, followed another's gaze less frequently, and looked for a shorter time at an object cued by another. Moreover, we found a positive correlation between looking time toward dynamic human images and frequency of gaze following at 12 months of age in full‐term, but not preterm, infants. We discuss the relation between the atypical patterns of gaze behavior in preterm infants and their higher risk of later social communication problems.     

Sensitivity to Social Contingency From Mothers and Strangers in 2‐, 4‐, and 6‐Month‐Old Infants

Infants' sensitivity to changes in social contingency was investigated by presenting 2‐, 4‐, and 6‐month‐old infants with 3 episodes of social interaction from mothers and strangers: 2 contingent interactions and 1 noncontingent replay. Three orders were presented: (a) contingent, noncontingent, contingent; (b) contingent, contingent, noncontingent; and (c) noncontingent, contingent, contingent. Contingency and carryover effects were shown to both mothers and strangers in the different orders of presentation. Infants were more visually attentive to contingent interactions than to the noncontingent replay when contingent interactions occurred prior to the replay, and the infants' level of attention to the noncontingent replay carried over to subsequent contingent interactions. The 4‐ and 6‐month‐old infants showed contingency and carryover effects by their visual attention and smiling. Examination of effect sizes for attention suggests 2‐month‐old infants may be beginning to show the effects. Reasons for age changes in sensitivity to social contingency are discussed.     

Infants' Sensitivity to the Causal Features of Means‐End Support Sequences in Action and Perception

Current work has yielded differential findings regarding infants' ability to perceptually detect the causal structure of a means‐end support sequence. Resolving this debate has important implications for perception‐action dissociations in this domain of object knowledge. In Study 1, 12‐month‐old infants' ability to perceive the causal structure of a cloth‐pulling sequence was assessed via a habituation paradigm. After seeing an event in which a supported toy was moved by pulling a cloth that it sat on, 12‐month‐old infants demonstrated longer looking to events that violated the causal structure of this sequence than to events that preserved the causal structure but varied other perceptual features of the event. Studies 2 and 3 investigated 10‐month‐olds' interpretations of means‐end support sequences using both a habituation paradigm and a task that assessed infants' own means‐end actions. Whereas 10‐month‐olds failed to demonstrate an understanding of the causal structure when tested using a flat cloth as the support (Study 2), sensitivity to this structure was apparent when a rectangular box was the support. These patterns were evident in both action and perception (Study 3). Moreover, individual variation in action task performance was related to visual habituation performance. The results are discussed with respect to the relation between action and perception in infancy.     

Encoding Action Roles in Meaningful Social Interaction in the First Year of Life

Previous research has shown that 6‐ to 9‐month‐old infants detect role reversals in dyadic interaction involving 2‐argument relations. These studies extend this line of research to a 3‐argument structure: An agent gives an object to a recipient. We conducted 4 experiments in a novelty‐preference paradigm. Infants were habituated to videotaped sequences of a puppet giving a flower to another puppet. In the test phase, the puppets' spatial positions were switched, and infants alternately saw role‐reversal and direction‐reversal trials. Results indicate that 10.5‐ and 12‐month‐olds but not 9‐month‐olds selectively encoded the change of action role (agent‐recipient) over a change in the spatiotemporal properties of the interaction and that action role encoding was specific to intentional relations in a 3‐argument structure. Thus, infants at the end of their 1st year seem to be sensitive to movement cues that specify intentional relations between an agent and a recipient.     

Checkbooks in the Heartland: Change over Time in Voluntary Association Membership

Numerous scholars documented declines in America's social capital through the mid‐1990s but we do not know whether the trend has continued. Further, despite warnings by Robert Putnam and Theda Skocpol that the quality of Americans' voluntary association memberships has also deteriorated—moving from active, “face‐to‐face” memberships to passive, “checkbook” memberships—data have not been available to test this claim. In this article, we use both the Iowa Community Survey and the General Social Survey to explore the changing nature of voluntary association membership between 1994 and 2004. We demonstrate that not only are declines in voluntary association memberships continuing in the new century but there has been a shift in the intensity of voluntary association participation over time. We observe a decline in active membership over time and an increase in checkbook membership over time. These findings provide support for Putnam's claim that checkbook membership is increasing at the expense of more active types of memberships.     

Demands on Finite Cognitive Capacity Cause Infants' Perseverative Errors

This research unites traditionally disparate developmental domains—cognition and locomotion—to examine the classic cognitive issue of the development of inhibition in infancy. In 2 locomotor A‐not‐B tasks, 13‐month‐old walking infants inhibited a prepotent response under low task demands (walking on flat ground), but perseverated under increased task demands (descending a staircase). Despite elimination of factors previously associated with infant perseveration, infants still perseverated in the difficult stairs condition. Increasing cognitive load by manipulating task difficulty affected infants' ability to inhibit repeated responses that were no longer appropriate. Evidence supports a cognitive capacity account of infant perseveration, in which infants' performance depends on allocation of cognitive and attentional resources.     

Bias for Vocalic Over Consonantal Information in 6‐Month‐Olds

Human languages rely on the ability to learn and produce an indefinite number of words by combining consonants and vowels in a lawful manner. The categorization of speech representations into consonants and vowels is evidenced by the tendency of adult speakers, attested in many languages, to use consonants and vowels for different tasks. Consonants are favored in lexical tasks, while vowels are favored to learn structural regularities. Recent results suggest that this specialization is already observable at 12 months of age in Italian participants. Here, we investigated the representations of younger infants. In a series of anticipatory looking experiments, we showed that Italian 6‐month‐olds rely more on vowels than on consonants when learning the predictions made by individual words (Experiment 1) and are better at generalizing a structure when it is implemented over vowels than when it is implemented over consonants (Experiments 2 and 3). Until 6 months of age, infants thus show a general vocalic bias, which contrasts with the specialization previously observed at 12 months. These results suggest the format of speech representations changes during the second semester of life.     

The Influence of Maternal Socialization on Infants’ Social Evaluation in Two Cultures

Although a growing body of research has explored the early development of social evaluation, no research has directly compared social evaluations of infants between different cultures. In addition, there has been little understanding regarding socialization's effects on this ability. The goal of this study was to expand on earlier findings on social evaluation in infants by investigating a broader sample from two cultures, and to explore the influence of maternal socialization on infants’ social evaluation. Using the violation of expectations and the preferential reaching paradigm, four groups aged 6‐, 9‐, 12‐, and 15–18 months and their mothers from Japan and the United States (159 dyads) were compared in terms of spontaneous social evaluations. Japanese and European American infants showed similar performance in dishabituation to the inconsistent behavior and in their reaching preference for prosocial over antisocial agents, indicating that the emergence of spontaneous social evaluation is not culture‐specific. Furthermore, our study provides a novel finding regarding the relationship between mothers’ socially evaluative speech and infants’ preference for prosocial over antisocial agents. These results suggest that the development of sociomoral understanding results from complicated interactions among evolutionary, cognitive, and social factors.     

Between the Procedural and the Substantial: Democratic Deliberation and the Interaction Order in “Occupy Middletown General Assembly”

This article analyzes interaction from an intentional, self‐reflexive democratic meeting of ordinary citizens—a “General Assembly” from the 2011 Occupy Movement—to explore two competing theories of democracy: Habermas's democratic deliberation and Mouffe's agonistic pluralism. The group's rational ideals and procedures for democratic deliberation approximate those of Habermas's “ideal speech situation,” but appear limited in their capacity to ensure Habermasian understanding or consensus. Intertwined with these rational procedures are practices best explained in terms of what Goffman called “face‐work”—the ways in which participants maintain a working consensus of mutual acceptance and respect in conversation. These face‐work procedures—rather than sincere, rational intentions—help constitute the civility necessary for rational deliberation and participation. Such symbolic valuing of self and other provide interactional grounds for the liberty and equality of agonistic democratic conversation as conceived by Mouffe.     

Experimenter Affective Expression and Gaze Following in 7‐Month‐Olds

The study of gaze following in infants younger than 12 months of age has emphasized the effects of gesture, type of target, and its position or placement. This experiment extends this literature by examining the effects of adults' affective expression on 7‐month‐olds' gaze following. The effects of 3 affective expressions—happy, sad, and neutral—on 7‐month‐olds' frequency of gaze following were examined. The results indicated that infants more frequently followed the gaze of an adult posing a neutral expression than that of an adult posing either a happy or a sad expression. The infants also looked proportionately longer toward the indicated target when the adult's expression was neutral. The results are interpreted in terms of infants' flexibility of attention.     

Emergence of Selective Social Referencing in Infancy

Seven and 10‐month‐old infants were presented with a remote‐controlled toy dog that intermittently barked at 30‐sec intervals as they faced an experimenter who either attended to them (look toward condition) or looked away (look away condition). Seven‐month‐old infants' looking toward the experimenter was significantly greater after the dog barking events compared to before regardless of experimental condition. In contrast, 10‐month‐old infants' looks were significantly greater after the barking events compared to before only when the experimenter was attending to them. These results suggest that by 10 months infants monitor and refer to people in an ambiguous situation depending on their attention toward them. This development is viewed as indexing the emergence of an intentional stance in social referencing by 10 months of age.     

The Development of Prospective Grasping Control Between 5 and 7 Months: A Longitudinal Study

By 7 months, infants, when reaching for an object, visually guide their grasp by preorienting their hands to match the object's orientation. Evidence at earlier ages, however, for prospective grasp control via anticipatory hand orientation is mixed. This study examined longitudinally the development of anticipatory hand orientation in 15 infants, seen every 3 weeks between 5 and 7.5 months. On each visit, infants were given 8 trials of reaching for an object oriented vertically and horizontally. Hand orientation at the first point of contact, prior to any tactile feedback, indexed infant prospective grasp. Between 5 and 7 months, infants showed evidence for qualitative transition in prospective control of grasp, supporting the contention that control of grasp shifts from being based on tactual feedback to being visually and therefore prospectively based. Implications for how prospective grasp emerges developmen‐tally are discussed.     

Transfer of Social Learning Across Contexts: Exploring Infants' Attribution of Trait‐Like Emotions to Adults

We explored whether 15‐month‐olds expect another person's emotional disposition to be stable across social situations. In three observation trials, infants watched two adults interact. Half the infants saw one of the adults (“Emoter”) respond negatively to the other adult's actions (Anger group); half saw the Emoter respond neutrally to the same actions (Neutral group). After a change in social context, infants participated in novel tasks with the (now‐neutral) Emoter. Infants in the Anger group were significantly more likely to relinquish desirable toys to the Emoter. We hypothesize that, in the initial observation trials, infants learned that the Emoter was “anger‐prone” and expected her to get angry again in a new social situation. Consequently, infants readily gave the Emoter what she wanted. These findings reveal three key features of infants' affective cognition: (1) infants track adults' emotional history across encounters; (2) infants learn from observing how people interact with others and use this to form expectations about how these people will treat them; and (3) more speculatively, infants use appeasement to cope with social threat. We hypothesize that infants form “trait‐like” attributions about people's emotional dispositions and use this to formulate adaptive responses to adults in novel social contexts.     

Means‐End Behavior in Young Infants: The Interplay of Action Perception and Action Production

In 2 experiments, the interplay of action perception and action production was investigated in 6‐month‐old infants. In Experiment 1, infants received 2 versions of a means‐end task in counterbalanced order. In the action perception version, a preferential looking paradigm in which infants were shown an actor performing means‐end behavior with an expected and an unexpected outcome was used. In the action production version, infants had to pull a cloth to receive a toy. In Experiment 2, infants' ability to perform the action production task with a cloth was compared to their ability to perform the action production task with a less flexible board. Finally, Experiment 3 was designed to control for alternative low‐level explanations of the differences in the looking times toward the final states presented in Experiment 1 by only presenting the final states of the action perception task without showing the initial action sequence. Results obtained in Experiment 1 showed that in the action perception task, infants discriminated between the expected and the unexpected outcome. This perceptual ability was independent of their actual competence in executing means‐ end behavior in the action production task. Experiment 2 showed no difference in 6‐month‐olds' performance in the action production task depending on the properties of the support under the toy. Similarly, in Experiment 3, no differences in looking times between the 2 final states were found. The findings are discussed in light of theories on the development of action perception and action production.