Author:
Tauzin Tibor,Gergely György
Abstract
Infants’ sensitivity to contingent reactivity as an indicator of intentional agency has been demonstrated by numerous referential gaze-following studies. Here we propose that variability of signal sequences in a turn-taking exchange provides an informative cue for infants to recognize interactions that may involve communicative information transfer between agents. Our experiment demonstrates that based on the abstract structural cue of variability of exchanged signal sequences, 10.5-mo-olds gaze-followed an entity’s subsequent object-orienting action to fixate the same object. This gaze-following effect did not depend on the specific acoustic features of the sound signals produced. However, no orientation following to target was induced when the exchanged signal sequences were identical, or when only a single entity produced the variable sound sequences. These results demonstrate infants’ early sensitivity to detect signal variability in turn-taking interactions as a relevant feature of communicative information transfer, which induces them to attribute intentional agency and communicative abilities to the participating entities. However, when no variability was present in the exchanged signals, or when the variable signal sequences were produced by a single entity alone, infants showed no evidence of attributing agency. In sum, we argue that perceiving contingent turn-taking exchange of variable signal sequences induce 10.5-mo-old preverbal infants to recognize such interactions as potentially involving communicative information transmission and attribute agency to the participating entities even if both the entities and the signals they produce are unfamiliar to them.
Funder
EC | FP7 | FP7 Ideas: European Research Council
Publisher
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Reference38 articles.
1. D. Sperber , D. Wilson , Relevance: Communication and Cognition (Blackwell’s, Oxford, 1986).
2. Pragmatics, Modularity and Mind‐reading
3. G. Gergely , P. Jacob , “Reasoning about instrumental and communicative agency in human infancy” in Rational Constructivism in Cognitive Development, F. Xu , T. Kushnir , Eds. (Academic Press, Cambridge, MA, 2012), pp. 59–94.
4. Communicative mind-reading in preverbal infants;Tauzin;Sci. Rep.,2018
5. M. Tomasello , Why We Cooperate (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2009).
Cited by
14 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献