L 6 Early social perception

• Newborn face preferences:

  • (Johnson & Morton) humans are born with a configurable mechanism that makes newborns orient to faces in order to learn about them
• Babyness:

  • Lorenz’s term for attractiveness of big eyes to head ratio.
  • Pre-pubescent children prefer pictures of mature animals but at puberty switch preference to young animals (Fullard & Reiling)
• Infant imitation:

  • Some believe that infants have the ability to imitate facial expressions from birth.
  • Newborn imitation is controversial and difficult to elicit.
• Contingency:

  • Murray & Trevarrian de-synchronised mother-infant interactions, producing disinterest and distress in 2-month olds.
  • Depressed mothers are either too flat or too exaggerated.
  • Still face experiment: mother at first interacts with baby, then stops interacting. Baby tries to interact and squeals, and reacts with negative emotions, and is very stressed.
  • Social smiling: emerges at around 2-3 months.
• Gaze following:

  •  signals mutual interest or something of importance.
  • Joint attention paradigm: infants will turn to look in the same direction if they have joint attention.
• Pointing:

  • Protoimperative = goal oriented, e.g. get me that, shared with other primates.
  •  Protodeclarative = object or event oriented, e.g. wow look at that! This is uniquely human.
• Interaction in ambiguity:

  • Joint attention 
  • Cliff experiment: if the mother looks encouragingly the baby will cross to the deep side but if she looks disapprovingly they will never.
  • Walk this way study: a child will not look for mother to walk a very steep or very flat walk. However when it is ambiguous the baby looks to mother for advice.