The next talk in the CDC seminar series will be given by:

Sabina Pauen, University of Heidelberg

Date: March 9, 2011, 5 PM

Location: Cognitive Development Center at CEU, Hattyś u. 14, 3rd floor

Learning categories from observing others - A case of natural pedagogy?

Abstract: Can infants understand that another person expresses interest for a specific category of objects (rather than for an individual exemplar)? My talk will provide evidence suggesting that this is the case. 

All experiments to be presented follow the same general paradigm: An actor is sitting behind two small boxes located left and right in front of her. On each box, a 3-D object is placed. On the one side, this object represents an animal and on the other side, it represents a vehicle. (These two global categories were chosen because we already know that even 4 months olds can discriminate them) The actor turns towards one of the two objects and looks at it with an interested facial expression. Infants see a total of 11 different scenes that follow this script. In each scene, a new pair of exemplars is presented, with the side of the animal / vehicle counterbalanced across trials. On the first 10 trials, the actor always turns towards the same kind of object, but at test, she turns toward the exemplar of the contrasting category. To check whether infants realized that the person changed the category of interest during the last trial, we compared the mean looking time on the 10^th and the 11^th trial. A significant increase in looking time was interpreted as indicating that infants realized the change in category of interest.

Using this paradigm, we tested infants ranging from 7 to 12 months, analyzing not only their looking time at test but also their looking patterns (i.e. gaze following, checking). Furthermore, we systematically manipulated social cues indicating the actors’ interest (i.e. contrasting scenes involving gaze information only with scenes including reaching behavior as well). We also ran a study replacing the actor by a desk-lamp turning towards the target and flashing it. With respect to the theory of natural pedagogy, two further studies seem of special interest: In one experiment, the actor did not establish eye-contact with the child before turning towards the target. In the other study, two actors were presented simultaneously, each focusing on one specific category, but exchanging their focus of interest at test.

In my talk, I will describe the above-mentioned studies in more detail. In addition, implications of our findings for the theory of natural pedagogy as well as some promising lines of future research involving our paradigm will be discussed.