Hi guys, sorry about that, we've got technical difficulties as the first lecture of the term. So obviously we've not started at five past, but normally we'll start at five past in technical difficulties allowing. The problem is that my videos aren't playing and I've got quite a lot of videos. So what I'm going to attempt to do is switch between the PC and my laptop and hopefully we'll be able to play them that way. And that means that there's a chance the videos would play on the recording of this lecture So this is going to be recording and posted in my identity But I'll either just post last year's which is largely the same and or post this one together So you should have the information either way So As you know, this is developmental psychology and welcome and the first part of the course and you're gonna have five lectures by me Josephine Ross, I'm a developmental psychologist and I work in the sort of middle ground between social and cognitive development.

So what we're going to do is cover things of a more social flavour in this first part of the lecture series. So today we're going to be talking about social communication and how that develops.

Next week we're going to talk about attachment, so that's just like the loving bond between starting with parents and children but actually it then carries on into your sort of romantic relationships and your relationships with your own children. We're then going to talk about social cognition, so that's like theory of mind knowing what someone else is thinking and what their intentions are.

We're then going to talk about self-awareness, which is actually where most of my research lies, so that development of that understanding that you're a person that's separate from other people and associated sort of developments like Then in the last bit of the lecture series we're going to think more broadly across the lifespan and how social development is something that continues throughout the lifespan and doesn't just apply in sort of infancy and early childhood. So a lot of these lectures focus on those really sort of foundational parts of infancy and early childhood. Our main aim now that you're in third year of your undergraduate course or now that you're in the master's year of your your conversion course is to learn not just about research facts which in fact aren't a thing but to think sort of critically about research evidence and so to think about the evidence that's in front of you and question it and because of that you do have a textbook so it's available in the library and it's got background to developmental psychology in general and that might be useful for some of you and particularly for you in the conversion course and to sort of orientate yourself to the subject area but actually everything that you need to know the essential sort of content from this course is covered and discussed within the lectures. So what you'll be able to see on My Dundee when you log in is a reference list for the lectures which is really long. You're not expected to read all those different references or source all those different references. What will happen in the lecture is I'm going to tell you about those different studies and those are just references to the studies that I'm talking about. So if there's a particular study that you don't understand based on what I've said in the lecture then you might want to go and look at the original source or if there's an area that you're particularly interested in you might want to look at the original source or if you're preparing for a coursework original sources or where it's at. So at this point in your sort of academic career you should always be looking to the original research.

However, don't get overwhelmed because everything you need to know is covered in the lecture itself.

Because we've got this sort of focus on thinking critically, the lectures are kind of structured to explore the question, normally one question in the first half, one question in the second half. This is a two-hour long lecture that's a long time and so what we tend to do is have a 10 minute break in the middle and we have to move the amount of time available for that break depending on when we start so we might only have five minutes today but at least gives us a chance to sort of get some of our energy and get ready to listen again for the second half and you'll see as we go on I'm gonna ask you some questions and I invite answers from you and also that you should ask me questions if if they come up so we're aiming for a sort of interactive comfortable space where we're talking about the research that's coming up on the slides and so if you do want to ask a question just raise your hand and I'll come to you and if I don't see you make a noise because there's lots of people to look at. At the end of every lecture there's a sort of summary of just the key question and the paradigms that we've covered so that just means the types of experimental studies that we've covered and the terms that we've covered. Those will be really useful for the undergraduates among you in terms of your exam revision and for the MSc students just in terms of getting a flavor of what you're supposed to have understood from that particular lecture.

Okay so that's the housekeeping stuff and we've got tutorials starting this week for MSc students and next week for undergraduate students and that's where I'll say at the coursework so I'll answer any questions on coursework then.

answer any questions on coursework then. One other thing I wanted to say in up in advance of the lecture, what I've called lecture notes, and those are abridged notes of the lecture just because I want to avoid spoilers, because I do want it to be interactive, I want to ask you questions that are not available to you on the slides, but I post the full set of slides after every lecture. If you've got particular learning adjustments which means that you need to see that full, full unabridged set of lecture notes, that's fine, You just need to email me and I'll send them, I'll just send you them all as a bulk, the whole lecture series is a bulk, so just email me, email addresses there. Okay, here's what we need to do, our Switching Magic to my videos. Is it not moving? It's going to be played by all the technical problems today. Oh, here we go. I think it's probably just taking a while to load them. So, I think it's been really tardy because it's got lots of lecture video content to upload so I'm going to try and switch to a laptop now anyway. Let's hope this works guys. Okay, so infants come into this world communicating, right? What's the first thing a newborn baby does?

does? Cry. So they're coming in emoting their needs and actually there's this whole language of emotional communication that happens in that first six months to a year of life even when variable communication isn't possible.

when variable communication isn't possible. I'm going to demonstrate this to you. So I'm going to show you the video and I want you to tell me what emotion that baby is experiencing. What's the baby feeling in that video?

What's the baby feeling in that video? Disgust, yeah, disgust.

yeah, disgust. And that's one of the earliest developing, I call it an emotion, but I guess a subjective state, something that you're How do you think that baby shall surprise?

How do you think that baby shall surprise? Yeah so that raising of the eyebrows and critically it's break into humour so it's like that's novelty and I'm quite surprised by that. This one's a little bit more painful. Okay, what's that baby feeling? Yeah, I used to be able to watch that without cringing, but now I can't anyway. Okay, let's see. How do you think that baby felt about the mobile that it was watching? Curious, yeah.

And actually that same, that interest face that that baby had on is baby's modal facial communication, so that's how they normally look. So they come in sort of a little curious, whereas adults' modal faces were like resting bitch face, like you've just got that neutral face on, rather than that sort of curiosity. It's like it started as the same as the surprise expression but it breaks to the negative feeling. This is just the happiest baby in the world. Laughing at the novel sounds and that's the first sorts of things that we've been finding funny. Actually I had to cut the video down, it's like twice as long as that. It never gets old for the baby. Okay, last one. You stay out of that dog bowl, okay? That's not your dog bowl. Okay? You stay out of it. You gotta stay out of the dog bowl, okay? Okay. So, the best actress in the world or the saddest baby that you've ever seen before. She's been in a dog's food. And so you're getting there that the babies are able to communicate what they're feeling, and they're feeling emotions in the same context roughly that we would expect as adults. And actually those constitute the universal or the basic emotions that you'll see in any psychology textbook that people experience throughout the world. So all of those universal emotions are already present in that in that first year of life.

Right okay now I need to switch again and my multitasking back to the PC. Actually maybe I don't because I want to show you other videos.

So we've got all those emotions present but communications is a two-way street right we're going to talk more about that and but we can also see that babies will respond to other people's communicative overtures so we saw that a little bit already, you saw that the baby was responding for example when the dad's making a funny noise or when the dad's giving them a row, so they're taking in that social input and actually you can see what we call in psychology proto conversations happening right from birth and the proto parts you don't really need it because actually it's just a conversation so if you see a parent and a baby talking to one another then you'll see the parent talk and leave the space and the baby will gurgle or talk back.

This is us having a little conversation When he was three months old going on here, which is what we would call a proto-conversation, and if you really want you to watch the rest of me talk to the store in my mother's voice, I'd skip to them.

Right, Okay, here we go.

So, psychologists have analyzed these early conversations, and psycholinguists in particular, and they find actually that the acoustic shapes that those early communications take are exactly the same as an adult communication, and so you'll have that back and forth that you would have in an adult communication.

You also saw within that video some evidence, and in the emotional contagion. So you saw there that Storff was getting a little bit upset at some point and I was trying to tip him back to his smiles, doing that by mirroring that emotion myself and actually that's a really classic sort of phenomenon that we see for children is that they catch the emotions of other people. So the classic study that's mentioned in any psychology textbook is a study by Fields.

They showed babies, their mothers posing particular facial expressions so again those universal emotion sets we've got the happy mum, the sad mum and the surprised mum and the babies copied those facial expressions spontaneously and so that's what the contagion is you catch it.

And actually if you show observers the images of the babies without the mums then they can identify which emotions the baby is displaying at that particular time. He's a good example of that. This is happy baby. Bad baby. Happy baby. Happy baby. It's funny. This is sad. Happy, just smile, smile. No more, no more. We're going to talk more about the power of parenting next week and whether that was a good idea or not, but you can imagine that this is a particular problem in instances so we have twins, where one upsets the other.

The babies will catch other babies' cries. Make it stop, we just need to be open. Right, okay.

Right, I'm going to switch back. God, this is the most emotional tasking I've ever done since Christmas. It appeared.

Oh no, I have one more video. Actually, you don't need to sign for this one, so if it plays I can play it from here. Emotional contagion or catching other people's emotions and it's a bit like imitation right, it's a bit like copying the emotion of the other person and in fact it doesn't just happen in emotional situations.

We already know again a classic phenomenon in child psychology is that right from birth, so as newborn babies ever as old, will imitate their caregivers expressions and so the the classic example is tongue protrusion, I'm So that is imitation in terms of tongue protrusion, but actually the classic research shows that you can do it with other types of expression as well. So classic study by Miltzoff and Moore, tongue protrusion but also mouth opening and lip person and you'll see just as in the field experiment the baby's copying those expressions and those expressions are really specific to what they're seeing modeled. So we've got evidence now that babies emote, they communicate their own emotions and also that they respond to other people's emotions and other people's actions but what we're going to consider today is whether or not that's actually about communication.

So whether there's really a intention is to communicate with their caregiver because there are a number of alternative explanations for that behavior. So it could be, for example, that those emotional responses are just natural subjective responses to the context that they happen in. So if someone injects me with a needle then I feel pain because that's a natural consequence of my having a body, a human body.

And actually the signaling of that pain, so when I cry because I'm in, pain could just be a byproduct of that, so it's not about communicating to other people that this hurts, it's just about me experiencing hurt, and that's a natural way I experience hurt.

I see that that's all those emotional responses are, and they're not necessarily about seeking communication.

It could also be, and I'd imagine this will occur to many of you as you watch the video where I'm talking to SOAR, is that maybe the infant looks a of the conversation, but maybe the adult's doing the heavy lifting in that conversation. So maybe the adult is what we would call scaffolding the conversation so that they're quiet when the baby's talking and vice versa, and then it looks like that normal natural exchange that adults are used to just because the mum's pausing and interjecting again where it's appropriate for her to do so. The other query that you might have is, I showed you some classic studies there of emotional contagion and of infant imitation.

Those studies came from the 70s and 80s.

You might question whether those findings can be replicated and whether those are really robust phenomenon or whether they might be explained in other ways or even not reproducible.

Even if you agree that that imitation is something that happens in the three criticisms you might query whether or not that's that's part of a sort of communication system or whether it's just an innate inbuilt thing so when I say innate I just mean you're born with it so it's like hardwired into your biology and that you have this sort of almost like a reflex to reflect the other person's actions back to them.

Okay, so let's look at more modern research, again still fairly old but more modern research, and actually you're going to talk about imitation in your coursework, both undergraduates and MSc students are going to be thinking critically about imitation for their coursework topic. So this is just a bit of an orientation to that to that research. And this is a study by Emma Jane Nagy, who many of you might have come across, she teaches on her course, and she's done a lot of work on neonatal imitation, so that's newborn imitation. And when she says new, she means really new, so babies between 3 and 54 hours old have taken part in her experiments.

And she used that classic paradigm of imitation where she would stick out her tongue for the baby to see if they would stick out her tongue back. Okay, what she did in this study was model for one minute, so she stuck her tongue for one minute, and then she waited for two minutes for the baby to respond, and then she would return to modeling. And that's your typical imitation paradigm, so if you look at the Meltzoff and Muir paper you'll find that that's what they did. So she was replicating their method. But after five minutes of that traditional paradigm, instead of going back to modeling, the behavior the experimenter just waited a bit longer so they waited from two to five minutes and what they were doing in that period was waiting basically to see whether the baby would reinitiate the interaction so whether the baby would start sticking their tongue again within that period and if the baby did do that then the experimenter would imitate the expression so it's like the rules have switched in that exchange so at first the experimenter sticks out her tongue, the baby copies.

But then there's this waiting period where if the baby sticks out their tongue, the experimenter starts to copy. And if the baby didn't do that, they just went back to their original cycle. What they found in this study was that that phenomenon of imitation did replicate quite strongly, so 78% of the vast majority of the newborns imitated in response to the experimenter modelling that tongue protrusion sign, but a substantial minority of the newborns also were able to initiate the interaction, so they restarted that exchange after the experimenter allowed them space to do so.

Now Naji and Moaner, the authors of this study, interpreted those initiations as communicative overtures, so they thought that the babies were actually trying to start a conversation and they called that provocation so they're trying to provoke a conversation or provoke a response in the other person and they argued that this was because the babies are born ready to communicate so this is a really strong claim saying that babies right from three to fifty four hours old come into the world intending to communicate with other people.

So we've got two different behaviors here we've got imitation and calling an invitation if the child stuck out her tongue less than two minutes after the experimenter but we've also got what we're terming provocation and the only difference behaviourally between those two things is in terms of timing so the tongue was stuck out more than two minutes after the experimenter stuck out her tongue.

the experimenter stuck out her tongue. Has anyone got an issue with the distinction between those says it's pretty much the same thing, right?

says it's pretty much the same thing, right? In terms of what you see, so that's what my graphics are for, in terms of what you see is exactly the same thing. It's just a matter of timing. So it would be quite a big claim to say that this is something different from that based on only the timing. But that's not what Najee and Volner did. They had further evidence to suggest that it's not just about the timing. So it's the same behaviour, but It's not just what we would call deferred imitation. So imitation after a little while, deferred till afterwards. Something else seems to be going on here. And what they based that on was their measuring of the infant's heart rate values. So they had a heart rate monitor on their infants. And what they found was that during these identical behaviors, they looked the same outwardly, we have different heart rate patterns. So during imitation, the infant's heart rate was rising, so it's accelerating up there you see in the bed where the imitation is happening. That rise in heart rate is associated with excitement or pleasure or stress or some sort of emotional arousal and also with movement. And so a certain amount of heart rate rises will be produced by the movement of the tongue. However, even when the tongue is moving and the provocation condition, we see a different heart rate pattern. So down here we see that the heart rate is actually getting lower during that provocation period. And that lowering of a heart rate is associated with expectancy of a response sort of preparation for an expected stimulus in adults and just attention in infants. So they were basing that larger claim on this finding that actually physiologically underlying these different avioric behaviours we find these different heart rate patterns. Still a big claim because as you'll see with all infant research the behaviours that we're basing our claims on are fairly simple.

The baby's non-variable, we have to have some sort of physiological or behavioural response that we are inferring to mean something psychological.

So that's always the big sort of critical gap in developmental psychology, whereby you can think critically about any sort of research evidence. Okay, so we've got some evidence, even if you don't buy that sort of distinction between imitation and provocation.

We've got some evidence that imitation is definitely happening innately, so you're born with it.

However, tongue protrusion is something that really naturally occurs in any baby's behavioral repertoire, so you see a baby will move their face around a lot and they'll sit your tongue around a lot.

And they'll particularly do it when they're trying to process something, so when there is some sort of they're in an aroused or an interesting state.

So it's a really common behaviour. And that makes things a bit more difficult to interpret because it could be that when they're part of this imitative exchange, when they're part of this social contact, then they're just getting more aroused and so they're sticking out their tongue more because that's one of the things that they do when they get excited and they get interested in something.

And that's why It's really important that we look beyond just tongue protrusion, but it's also why it's important that Najee and Mautler had this other measure of heart rate, which can't actually be easily explained by this explanation. So if it's just about arousal, then actually the babies weren't feeling excited or aroused in the provocation condition, but they were still sticking to their tongue. So there's lots of little bits of evidence that you need to put together to try and determine whether or not you think imitation is part of the communication system. Another bit of evidence that you might want to add to that is that it's not just about tongue protrusion, so it's not limited to that gesture.

Now again, research from Nagy where she modeled something that was a completely novel movement for infants, so it's not part of their normal behavioral repertoire and it was a finger movement.

So they're just extending their index finger, the finger that is, and moving it around.

And again with really young infants.

So this is quite an important twist on the experiment.

Firstly, as I said, because it's not part of the infant's normal repertoire but also because we know it's intentional. So it's not part of their repertoire but they can volitionally or intentionally move their own hands into certain shapes.

So if they produce this behavior upon seeing someone else produce that behavior or model that behavior, then you can be clear that they are intentionally doing it. And that gets you a step closer to this idea of intentional or conscious communication.

Okay, so here are Najee's results.

And so we've got their hand movements, which so babies do move their hands a lot, they just don't do this particular movement, and this is the particular finger movement that the baby performs.

And you can see that the nonspecific hand movements decreased during the modelling periods, and the modelling periods in white, and the finger movements increased.

So they were like honing down their hand movements to model what the experimenter had been modelling during that period.

And actually they really gradually refined the movement across the course of the study as you would expect if you're learning a new behavior and so you're using trial and error to try and match the behavior to someone else and so it doesn't seem to be as natural to babies as tongue protrusion is which is part of their natural repertoire but it is something that they can produce if given enough time to produce it.

Okay some of the problems with this though are that as you can see the increases in those movements are fairly small and they're actually clouded by that continuous hand movement that the baby's already occurring. So you might still question to what extent that's under conscious control. So if a baby's always moving its hands then what are the chances it's going to move its finger at some points into this particular constellation that we're calling novel just through chance.

So that's why it's really important in imitation experiments to have some sort of baseline or control measure that you're measuring. So you might want to compare how often the child produces that finger movement when they're just sitting about moving their hands versus when they're having that movement modeled for them if you're gonna make claims about imitation, which imagine when they're dense. So this was against the sort of baseline measure. Switch to show you. The interpretation of imitation as part of a communicative system is controversial and up until a few years ago in this lecture that's what we would focus on. So we just focused on whether or not you can infer from this basic behaviour that a baby is part of this communicative system.

But actually more recently a few papers, a sort of handful of papers came out to debate the claim that imitation happens at all.

And that, as I mentioned earlier, is going to be the focus of your coursework, because it's a real, live, big issue in developmental psychology that still hasn't been resolved.

And the problem with that research is that the new papers attempted to address was that they said that the controls in those experiments weren't sufficient to rule out alternative explanations for behaviour.

And when they implemented that sort of control, they were unable to replicate imitation.

And you'll see when you read the coursework paper, we're not going to cover the particular paper today. But what I'm going to get you to do is watch these home videos. These are of my children again.

my children again. So they're now big, but ours fall. So streamers is just going to be six weeks in this first video and founds I think a month old and I'm trying to get intimidate in their own natural condition so I want you to watch these videos and I want you to tell me what what else you would need to happen to determine if that baby was really I thought you were so beautiful and he looks like an old shriveled old man. Oi. Okay. Next video. On the science tube! Homey. Hello. She must us Science with balance. Are you convinced?

Are you convinced? If you saw those videos, would you take from that anecdotal evidence that babies can imitate, or what would you need to know to test that in scientific conditions? There's some spoilers down here at the bottom that you might be able to borrow from. Lots of babies. So you need lots of babies to show that all babies can do this, that it's not just by chance. What else might we need to show that it's not just by chance? So we're waiting, and you can see in those videos that babies continuously move their faces around, and every now and again they stick their tongue out, but we need this proper baseline condition to know if they do that more when modelling is happening than when it isn't. It seems like it's possible that the tongue protrusion might almost be automatic, almost like yawning. And there's no real way to know if they're just, if they see a tongue and they just do it but they don't think about it. Yeah, exactly. So if there's like an automatic elicitor, so any reflex action in your environment has some sort of automatic elicitor to it. And it could be that babies protrude their tongues, but they only do so because of this inbuilt need to do that.

inbuilt need to do that. I guess I would say, and we'll get further into this as you think about your coursework, the only thing to think then is, well why is it hardwired? So what's that behaviour there for?

there for? Is it there so that you have that hardwired biological motivation or need, or I guess I'm sorry for the right word, but to match your body with someone else's? Because when an infant does that, when they stick out their tongue and the adult's sticking out their tongue, they're actually matching what they're physiologically experiencing and what they're experiencing in terms of what brain neurons are firing with the adults. So they are tuning in in some senses to the adult, which could be the very start of a more sort of complex communication system. There are all these shades of grey in terms of when you're gonna see that actually happens and to what extent I want to argue for that being meaning that babies are born with We're also going to want to know if they do things other than stick out their tongue, so if they're just into copying me generally, or if as you say it's just this one particular focal behaviour, or how much they're doing it generally. So there's lots and lots of different control conditions that we would need, and we're going to talk more about that in the coursework tutorials when we get there. So if we move away from imitation for the moment, given we're going to have more chance to discuss that in the tutorials then we might want to think more critically about our other examples so of those responses as part of general communication so proto conversations. If infants are actually actively participating in a proto conversation and it's not just something that the mother is making it seem like it's happening then actually they should be invested in that conversation and they should react negatively if that conversation stops unexpectedly. Again, there's a classic developmental psychology paradigm that was designed to test this assumption. So to test this theory that infants are part of a conversation with their adult caregivers, and when that conversation is disruptive, they should have some sort of reaction if they're truly involved in that conversation. So the still-faced paradigm just involves parents and caregivers in that normal communicative exchange. But then what happens is the mother is asked to pose a still face or to freeze to stop the engagement or the father and who they're working with. And then to attempt to re-engage the baby and we see how the baby responds. I'm going to show you a video because It's much better to explain even though we have to do it. Let me just skip it over. So I believe. And then still the phase experiment what the mother did was she sits down and she's playing with her baby who's about a year of age. I love her. And she gets a greeting to the baby. The baby gets a greeting back to her. This baby starts pointing at different places in the world. And the mother's trying to engage her and play with her. they're working to coordinate their emotions and their intentions, what they want to do in the world. And that's really what the baby is used to. And then we ask the mother to not respond to the baby. The baby very quickly picks up on this. And then she uses all of her abilities to try and get the mother back. She smiles at the mother.

She smiles at the mother. The baby puts both hands up in front of her and says, what's happening?

She makes that screechy sound at the mother like, come on, why we doing this?

we doing this? Even in this two minutes when they don't get the normal reaction, they react with negative emotions, they turn away, they feel the stress of it, they actually may lose control of the impostor because of the stress that they're experiencing. He has a clear reaction to that break in communication, which is known as the still face response to that so that being upset or becoming more sober than you were before in terms of happiness or averting your gaze and it also takes babies a while as you can see to recover from that.

Tronic's interpretation as you can tell from that voiceover which was tronic, tronic's interpretation was that this is because the babies are basically annoyed by that break in communication.

They were intending to communicate and those communicative attempts have been thwarted.

So that's how you interpret it in that very sort of social realm. So why else do you think the infants might react negatively in that situation? They have it hardwired, that if someone isn't paying attention to them, they're in danger, so it's inherently negative to them. Yeah, so there could be like an evolutionally hardwired response that you need to get you need to have your caregivers attention because you're really vulnerable at that point.

really vulnerable at that point. Yeah yeah so this is totally unfamiliar they're normally engaged in these attentive conversations then perhaps that this is this is unusual and so it's in a sense to sort of learn to expect that and now that expectation's been thwarted, yes. Well I think this is more of an observation. So they're in a new scenario, they're in a new room. This isn't like a scenario that they're used to, so they could already be feeling more arousal because of all the other things that are happening and therefore they're quicker to get upset, so it's not unusual behaviour. Yeah, that's right. So there's always that middle ground between a sort of naturalistic observation where you know the baby's probably behaving as they would normally behave as they would typically behave, and a controlled experimental situation. And they both have positives and negatives because you might need to control things that would happen in a natural situation. So, for example, me keeping telling people they're a good boy or a good girl for imitating, which is reinforcing them. But you also might lose stuff by taking things into a sort of lab-based situation. Okay, so the babies were sort of covered in those points there, that the babies are used to getting attention. and actually the babies need attention and so when they don't get attention they're reacting negatively and but it could be for any of the reasons that we covered and it could be that they've become bored by the situation because they're not getting that usual stimulation but actually it could also be about emotional contagion so the mother suddenly is posing this still sober facial expression and we see that the still face response involves that sort of sobering up your facial expression. So how do we know that the baby isn't just sort of catching that emotion off of its mother?

sort of catching that emotion off of its mother? So there's lots and lots of different sort of explanations that you could come up with to query this claim that the still-face response is really about that break in communication. I'd like to realize some of these explanations, but not all of them, is to change the still-face.

So if we are thinking that maybe it's about emotional contagion or even about intimidation so the mum's staring at the baby and that's really unusual and maybe evolutionarily that's quite threatening. So what we might want to do is substitute the still face with an active face but a face that's not communicative and the way that this has been done is to have the face still be moving and still trying to interact but the interactions that the face or the mother produces aren't contingent on, or aren't caused by, what the baby's doing. So the mum is no longer reacting to the baby, they're just babbling without it being part of that communicative exchange. And the way that that's been set up in a sort of experimental paradigm is just to have a live video feed between the baby and the mother.

So then the mother is responding to her baby as she normally would in this back and forth reciprocal conversation, and then they would play the video again to the baby at later points. The baby doesn't know if the mum's live or not, but this second video, what the mum's doing is no longer contingent on what the baby's currently doing.

So the infant sees that live footage of the parent, they've got engagement there, and then they see the footage of the parent replayed. And what we find there is a classic still-faced response. The infant still gets annoyed in the break of communication. Even when mum hasn't frozen, she still looks communicative, but she's no longer reacting specifically to what they're doing in the moment.

Is that enough or is there something wrong with this, the setup of this? So they see the mum doing this thing and then they see it again.

Yeah, maybe they remember it and maybe they've got a bit bored by the situation because they've already seen this interaction before and so important to rule that out and this has been done so this team ruled out that effect of repetition or of time in a really sort of complex set up and you see in the video I mean this is back in 2006 but they had this same sort of idea of a paradigm in that the infant was played the live video so and then they saw a replay of the parent and then engagement so that's the first part of the other study repeated but then they had other conditions. So basically they had the infant see the live parent but the parent sees a replayed infant and again the parents and infants are blind to this so they're responding to what their infant's doing but their infant's seeing and they're responding to their infant in the past essentially so it's all no longer reciprocal and what they found is even in that case, so even when this was a completely novel interaction for the baby, it's new, the parents producing it new, it wasn't enough because it wasn't contingent on what they were currently doing. It wasn't a reciprocal exchange and the baby showed the classic still-faced response. Okay.

Okay. It's a really complex setup that shows us that actually it does seem to be about contingency. So it seems to be about that causal link between the infant's behaviour behaviour in the mum's or the parent's behaviour. But when we started this we were thinking we were basically about just this being about the still face and the expression. How else might we have tasted that without that sort of complex set up?

of complex set up? What tweak to that still face experiment would rule out that idea that the state is somehow intimidating or a core? Yeah, just have a still happy face.

And again, researchers have done that.

So Dentrant Manure had five months old infants.

And the video is cut off by the Yuja, but basically they've got this contingent normal introduction.

So that's engagement. And this is the baby's gaze or the baby's smile.

So gazing red, smiling blue. And this is the frozen still face. and this is the happy face and you can see that response is exactly the same. So it doesn't matter to the baby how the mum freezes.

Even if she freezes in a nice and happy facial expression the baby still perceives that negatively.

So if we put that evidence together with the more complex evidence above which really varied and sort of pinpointed in those differences in contingency then what we get is some pretty strong evidence actually what the babies are reacting to within the still-faced situation is a breakdown in contingency, so a breakdown in that causal exchange and social interaction. However, we've still not ruled out the other alternative explanation that came from the floor which was that maybe the infants aren't really reacting to their parents withdrawing because they wanted to be part of that conversation, but they're just reacting because this is really weird what's happening now.

I'm not part of a conversation, and I'm used to being part of a conversation, and I've learned that this is how we communicate and so it's unfamiliar to me and I'm going to signal my distress. Right from birth, parents speak to their babies in that situation and so the still-faced situation is going to come. For most babies that's a bit of a surprise in the situation.

So it makes sense that maybe they've just learned that that's how they normally communicate, and so they're then having those learnings evaluated.

Actually, the still-face response was originally formulated to model the impact of post-NATO depression on mothers and children. When you think about really serious post-NATO depression, then it disrupts these sorts of proto-conversations, so there's not so much back and forth reciprocal exchange between the mother and the infant.

And what Field found was that basically infants of depressed mothers show a depressed or face response so they react less to that break in communication than infants with mothers who are typically more engaged to.

So that speaks to this idea and that it depends what you've learned. It depends on your early learning environment. If you've learned that someone will respond reciprocally to you when they stop doing that, you object. If you've not learned that, then you don't object as strongly when they stop doing that.

So that sort of constellation of evidence would rule out this idea that it's just an evolutionarily hardwired thing and suggest that it's about social learning. Okay, however, nothing's ever simple in this class as you will come to find out. And there is a bit of counter evidence that it's all about learning and that comes from newborn studies.

So if you can show the still face response in a newborn baby just hours old then basically it's not about learning because they haven't had time to learn that expectation and people tried to do that. I'm going to show you two different studies with contradictory results and seeking to answer that question okay study and it's testing and newborns and comparing their responses on the still face to 1.5 months old infants and three months old infants so this is when they're interacting normally on the graph this is when the still face happens and this is when they like re-engage at the end so they're like normally again you'll see that we're most interested here in newborns and So this circular marker that's clear is a newborn smile and the marker that's coloured in is their gaze. So that's in terms of the gaze aversion that happened.

And the other markers on there are for the older children. So what they found here was that the three months old showed the typical still-faced response. You see that little dip in the graph where they're stopping smiling and they're reverting their gaze. The 1.5 month olds also showed that tip but what they thought they were less good at was re-engaging so they weren't very good at recovering from that break in communication. The most important part for us is in terms of the newborn changes then the changes are non-significant. So you can see for the smiling, it's just flat all the way across and you can see for the gaza version that we've got a dip but it's not as steep as the dips for the other age groups and that's why it's not coming out as a significant change.

So according to this study newborn infants don't show distill face response but can anyone see an issue with this and how they have measured distill face response and whether that's fair for newborns.

I look particularly at this line.

I see someone whispering sixty seconds which is actually a good point because that's a really brief period and newborns take much longer to process things so maybe it's not fair to test them all in that really brief six-second period when you've got this wide range of age range because they should have given them more time. But there's also something else in terms of this as a dependent variable as an outcome measure, the smiles.

How many smiles are we getting from the newborns? None.

So it's a zero. So arguably it's not really fair to test for change on a measure that the newborns can't even produce yet. So okay newborn babies will start to smile by around six weeks but you're not getting social smiles in this period. So the way they've operationalised their dependent measure or their outcome variable is again not very fair to the Both of those issues, so the issue of timing and the issue of smiles, are dealt with in this next study by Nagy.

So she had newborn infants and this time she gave them three minutes of the still face response and she was measuring now their gaze and the level of distress. So the gaze we're still looking for that dip and you can actually see the bit happening, so this is in terms of the dip in their knees to their mother during the still-face, then we see that significant dip.

And over here, this is distressed, so the newborn infants were becoming significantly more distressed than they were in the engagement condition.

So she finds, by tweaking the outcome measures and by giving the infants a longer amount of time, then she does find the classic still-faced response in newborn infants. And you might use that to argue against this idea that it's just something that's learned. Again, Nagy's got particular spin on this, so she argues that that means that we are hardwired to expect communication from birth.

So essentially, we have these sort of biological biological mechanisms that are inbuilt in us, but the purpose of those biological mechanisms are to allow us to communicate with other people. So we're going to wrap up and we're going to have a little break.

So far we've learned that we've got some evidence for social responses in newborn infants, but when we begin to sort of drill in critically and think about those, then we might query whether they really mean that the infants are actually intending to communicate with other people. We've also begun to reflect on the fact that actually infants have a really limited repertoire of behaviours and the responses that can be modelled and that means that when we're trying to derive psychological conclusions from their behaviour then that's quite difficult for us because the evidence is always going to be quite ambiguous. We've covered that fact that maybe there's some sort of unequal exchange in the relationship, so maybe the mum's really invested in communication and she's scaffolding communication in the infant. And the infants know that I'm gay. So what we're going to cover in the second part of the lecture is a form of communication that by its very definition involves two parties both taking an intentional stance, and that's called referential communication, but that happens when someone, personally let's call them, sends a person B, any of you, a signal about an object. So if I say, what's this thing down here? Then that's us engaged in referential communication.

But I don't have to do that verbally, so I could do that non-verbally quite easily also. I could look at it and I could point at it and I could gaze alternate and I could do this expression for all that thing down there. So it doesn't have to be verbal. So we're going to talk after our short break about when babies begin to show that sort of referential communication. So communication about a specific thing in the environment. for now.

for now. Let's take like five minutes-ish, so that would mean we're back at 3.17 and Okay, so in the referential communication that I was describing to you just before our break there, I was talking about the thing, then the intent of the personee is to draw attention to the thing. And so intent in that case is built into the communicative interaction, so you've got to intend to do it in order for it to happen. And that's why it's a really good test of this idea that infants might be intentionally communicated. So what we're going to consider in this second half of the lecture is whether or no infants can do that. Can they engage in referential communication? OK. So what sort of behaviors do you think we're looking for in a newborn or in a young infant here to signal referential communication? what might I look for?

what might I look for? Yeah, signals, what kind of signals? Yeah, physical signals like pointing, I guess, or verbal, non-verbal gestures like pointing.

Gaze? Perfect. Good. So, I might look for gaze, I might look for pointing, I might particularly look for gaze alternation, so that's when I look at you and then I look back to check that you're looking between being the thing.

And in an older infant, of course, I might look for speaking, so that's how we as adults do most of our referential communication.

But that depends on whether or not it's developmentally appropriate at that stage. In these lectures, because we're talking about the very foundational referential communication, we're going to be signalling on those, focusing on those first two, so gaze alternation and pointing. Okay, most of the time when we look for referential communication in infants, we use gaze alternation and we use pointing at the same time, so we consider them together. And that's because on its own, gaze alternation, so looking at something and then looking at a person, it's thought to be a sort of weaker indicator of actually intentional behaviour. Can you think why that might be.

why that might be. Why does a point provide stronger evidence than you looking at something and back at you?

and back at you? Yeah, exactly. So, I have to look somewhere, right? So, I might just be looking about, not intentionally, just looking at things, things that capture my attention, visual attention.

Yeah and we're going to talk about exactly that in a minute in terms of social referencing so you might be queued where to look by where someone else is looking.

And indeed if that happens then that's part of referential communication in a sense because you're drawing the other person's attention to the stimulus.

But one of the ways we think critically about social referencing and about referential communication more generally is an environment. We all share the same interests, so if a tiger jumped through the window, we would all look at it just because it's an early interest to do it. So we can't just rely on that drawing of attention, because attention could be drawn by the stimulus itself and not by the social partner unless we pay attention to that. So that's why we, and by its very token, other token, I don't need to point anywhere. So I only point when I'm intentionally trying to do something. I've volitionally produced that behaviour. you.

you. Why would we bother then with gaze alternation at all in that situation?

at all in that situation? It's still a communicative important signal.

I use gaze alternation to check your reaction. I use it to check whether or not you have referred to the thing that I'm referring your attention to.

It's a really communication and in fact gaze alternation almost always goes with points. People will point at things and then not look at them.

So it's part of that sort of naturalistic communicative behavior.

Okay so pointing with gaze alternation is a really clear signal of intentional communication. So the infant or the child has had to intentionally produce this gesture and the best explanation for the use of that gesture although we'll think about that critically in a little minute, we will be drawing someone else's attention to stimulus.

So that suggests that they're part of this communicative exchange and we can see pointing the production of points with gaze alternation by the time an infant is 12 months old. So we're no longer talking about newborn infants here, we're talking about at the end of infancy we begin to see these types of behaviors behaviors emerge.

And those types of behaviors are emerging alongside verbal communication. So infants will start to produce their first words around the same period between 10 and 15 months, and then their vocabulary grows and grows and grows. We're not going to cover language development here.

There is stuff in the textbook on that if you're interested. We're going to focus in on the non-verbal behaviors. I'm going to give you a switch quickly. There's less switching in this part of the lecture, but I'll switch to show you an example of referential communication.

Babies are able to understand pointing from about eight months but they are only able to do it themselves from around 11 months. Babies start to point whether either their whole hand or their index finger.

At first these gestures are quite messy but soon babies learn to coordinate the extension of their arm and index finger with their visual attention to whatever has caught their interest.

By By alternating gaze between this and the person they are pointing for, they gradually start to attract the attention of others towards an object or actions of interest. Around 12-14 months, babies can even point to places where they used to be an object that is no longer there. This shows that they understand the function of pointing as a communicative tool independently from the object itself. Pointing is often combined with vocalisations in order to emphasise the meaning of the message or to add extra information.

Pointing can be clearly differentiated from conversation and gestures with an established meaning, such as waving to say hello. When playing with objects or reading a picture book, it is easy for adults and babies to use gestures to coordinate their attention. can help both because it models the gesture for the baby and helps them to understand adult communication. So if we start our journey, so that lecture, that video sorry, foreshadows a lot of the stuff that we're going to cover in the lecture in terms of when infants do what, but it also foreshadows some of the critical points that I want you to think about. So when an infant points at something, as we saw in those videos, what do the parents do? Or what else might they do? They might point themselves.

Either one is sharing attention, right? So you're showing that you received that signal and you're sharing the attention back. What else might you do? They put them closer to the thing. Yeah, so they might put the baby closer to the thing, or they might put the thing closer to the baby. So they might pass the baby something that the baby wants. So there are two different, we can sort of distinguish between those different activities in terms of a sort of psychological connection, so we're sharing attention to this object and actually maybe I'll name no object or otherwise show you that I've found it, or I might fetch that object for you, so I might deliver that object to you. So, in a sense, lots of the earliest thedas thought that pointing was basically like tool use. So, you're using someone else as a tool in your environment to help you navigate it. So, I'm going to use someone else as a tool to help me find out the name of things, or I'm going to use them as a tool to deliver things to me that I want. So, let's say I'm pointing at my milk bottle and I want it to be fed, then that is a useful social tool. Importantly, for our sort of debate today, there's a distinction between an intention behind those points, so what the infant intends to happen. So in a proto-declarative point, the point is an extension of psychological desire. So what I mean by that is a proto-declarative point is just you want to draw someone's attention to something. So to try and remember it you I declare this thing is here and that's all you want to do.

You just want to declare that the thing is there and you want another person to label it or somehow share attention with that thing.

So you're making a sort of psychological connection with that person. You just want them to notice what you've noticed. You just want to declare that something's there.

A proto-impenitive point is quite different.

So there the point is an extension basically of your imperative to get that thing and that's why I'm producing this point.

Those are very different intentions and they're very different intentions in terms of the debate about communication. So which one of those do you think would be a better evidence for the fact that the baby wants to communicate? Yeah, it's part of, so proto declarative is what you're saying, and that's part of our natural, I guess we could call it communication, and so that's why it fits in as being the strong evidence for communication.

Why are proto-impeditive points, some points where we want something way stronger? That's right, baby. Yeah, so you're just looking at basic reinforcement learning. And it could be even as simple as you saw in the video that she said it takes it well for pointing gestures to be defined from a more of a grabbing gesture. So it could be that initially a baby reaches out for things that it wants. And when it's something that it wants that it can have, the parent gives them it and that's reinforced. When it's something that they want that they can't have, they label it and that becomes inherently reinforcing and but those are very different situations but we can always explain away proto-impetitive points in terms of just that classic conditioning so the baby's been rewarded for producing that behavior because when they do that they get something they want and whereas there's no material reward at least for protodecalarative points it's all in that psychological space Right labeling those ideas were here.

Right labeling those ideas were here. Let's see for this one Wanted to fit Okay We both result in the same thing so they both result in that joint attention everyone's paying attention to the reference and And they're both really important for successful communication, especially when you're not locomotive yet and you want things to be delivered to you. So it's not that one point is better than the other. It's just that in terms of thinking about intentional communication, protodiclanative points provide you with better evidence for that. Okay, so we've already covered that, like that. So this idea that it's just about the reinforcement of reaching for something that's unreachable in terms of an imperative object. So it's only when you point at something and you don't actually want to have that, that you can be sure that intention is not for you to have it but just to draw the other person's attention to it. So you've got a communicative intent. So what we're going to focus in on now is when do babies begin to produce those proto declarative points?

is when do babies begin to produce those proto declarative points? So points that we can't explain away as just then reaching for something or wanting something to be delivered to them. Okay so Laskowski and his colleagues have done a series of experiments on this In this experiment, they had the researcher use an object that was pretty uninteresting to a baby, so I think it was a hole punch in this situation. And then they dropped the object or they somehow displaced it or moved it and they looked around and they said, where is it? So a natural communicative situation where the researcher is looking for a communication from the child. And what they found in this situation is that all of the infants, I've not put an age up here, oh here we go, 12 months old infants, 18 months old infants, and all of the infants were producing these sorts of points on at least one trial, and that was more to the target object, so the whole punch that the experimenter had been using, than to the distracted object, so in this case a piece of paper.

Okay, and none of them kept on pointing after the experimenter had retrieved their objects, after they picked it up. So what's that really, what's that really out for us? Yeah, so they don't want it.

Their, their communicative gesture was terminated after the experimenter got it for themselves, so it's not that imperative gesture. So that really looks like the point of the intensive gestures in this study, as young as 12 months, was simply to tell the experimenter where their most objective was.

Okay, so we don't have pro to imperative motives for that.

Similar study by the same lab tested 12 months old infants in four different conditions. So here they have joint tension conditions where when the infant pointed the experimenter would react by, as you would normally expect, by looking at the reference and reacting with interest. Uninterested situations where they would look at the reference but then they would just be like uninterested in it.

A misunderstanding so in that case the experimenter would look at the wrong thing but they still seem interesting but they're not looking at the right thing and then we've got a no shading condition. So here the experimenter reacted to the infant pointing by looking at the wrong reference and they also did it here so they're completely getting the whole thing wrong. Okay.

Okay. What we found in this study was that the most repeated points were produced in this misunderstanding condition. So why do you think that would be?

So why do you think that would be? Why do the infants keep pointing in that condition? Frustration.

Frustration, yeah. Because their signal's not been received, right? So the terminator of that signal is that I've successfully communicated. In this condition, I haven't successfully communicated because they're looking at the wrong reference.

However, this person is open to communication because they're reacting with interest and so I'm going to keep on trying to communicate because it seems like these are the sorts of conditions I could communicate in. Here, the person's not interested anyway so maybe I'm going to be less engaged with that particular topic.

There's quite subtle differences in how the infants behaved based on these people's communicative signals. So this part is an understanding of what the adult is communicating in terms of their intentions or their sort of emotional or subjective state. So those papers, and these are just examples of many, provide pretty strong evidence that at least by 12 months, and some papers bring the age down lower, but at least by 12 months infants are producing those protodecalarative signals to specific reference.

What we need is the other part of that in order to conclude that they're actually involved in referential communication. So we need to know that they're also pro-setting other people's signals. And that last experiment that we looked at does that a little bit because we saw that they differentiated between the people who are interested and uninterested. But we might want to drill into that a little bit further okay because we need both we need an infant to sort of flexibly take both roles and if we're going to agree that they're actually communicated in part of this communicative exchange okay there are various like different ages that people claim for this and this this is what we're talking about earlier in terms of gains following of other people um But the the youngest age of onset is found in naturalistic situations So it either in the house or in an experiment that's set up to be naturalistic So here in this experiment, we have an experimenter who was talking to two puppets and she would turn her head to one puppet and turn her head to engage with the other And the key question was whether or not the three to six month olds involved in this experiment would follow the conversation So whether they would follow her gaze to this puppet, see what this puppet was saying and follow her gaze to that puppet Okay, so they tested three months old and five months old and six months old The number of correct turns so the turns to the puppet that was currently engaged Are shown in black and you can see that all for all of those age ranges More of the infants attention is drawn to the puppet that's a current part of the focal gaze of the adult So the infants are following the gaze of the adult So even though the other puppets are an interesting visual stimulus, they're more engaged with the one that the adult is engaging with. Okay. What controls would we need to have here to make sure that the infant's only looking at that object because the adult is talking to it, because they're interested in the communicative exchange? Change the puppets around? Yes. Both so that one puppet isn't more interested in the other. Yeah, so you need to have like exactly the same puppets or you need to somehow counterbalance it so that it's not just about the side of that that particular more interesting puppet as well. Yeah, so it could be the movement so actually the things the the reference should probably stay still, but even it could be the movement of the adult's head that's drawing visual attention in that direction in a sort of more automatic sense. So there's lots of different controls that you would need to sort of think about when you're implementing that sort of experiment.

With those controls, that problem of an infant just finding that moving stimulus more interesting and that just drawing their attention in this area and then them coming across the other pop-ups, though by chance, can't really be ruled out in a situation where the reference are clearly visible to everyone.

And so we need a different paradigm to figure out if it's definitely only because the adult's looking that they are looking. And that paradigm we're going to call a barrier study.

So basically we're hiding what the referent is and we want to see if the infant will follow the adult's gaze to find a referent even when it's not just out and open drawing their attention that way. Sounds complicated but it's not really.

So here's a barrier study and again this was foreshadowed in the video by our same babies can point to things that used to be there.

So here we have an adult and she looks down to one part of it that's like a barrier in front of them and the baby and she'll just gaze down as though there's something here behind the barrier and then we just track where the babies look. So this is just a looking time experiment. We're just looking where eight months old and twelve months old infants are looking. And we want to know whether they look somewhere that's consistent with where the experimental is looking or inconsistent. But because we're really young babies here, it's set up in terms of a violation of expectation experiment. You might have come across those so where you would expect a baby to look longer at something that it's surprised by. So it's almost as though the baby makes a prediction. So here all of us would make the prediction that something's going to be there. And if the barrier raises up and there's nothing there, then we're going to be surprised by that and we're going to look at it longer. So they wanted to see if the babies, these eight month olds, would also have that reaction.

And they found that they did. So infants of both those ages would look longer at that empty space when the model had steered at that space as though there something in it than when there was something there or than when she hadn't looked in that area. So it seems that the baby is based only on the person's gaze, which is the only stimulus that's communicative in this situation, where expecting something to be there. Again, ambiguous because it's just looking time, but the baby's followed the gaze and seemed to be expecting someone to look at something.

You can see a slightly older infant with sort of more active outcome variables.

So in Mullen Thomasello's study they had the adult look at an object that the infant wasn't able to see because it was behind a barrier and then they also had the adult look at an object which was actually sat on the barrier. So this is, imagine this desk is barrier. There's an object on the desk and there's an object beyond it and I can either look beyond it or I can look at the object that's on the desk.

The turn of my head is really similar either way but I've got different communicates of intent either way.

And their key question here was would the infants track that line of sight? So now it's not just head turn it's actual line of sight. Am I looking at the telephone that's on the barrier or am I looking down here at my chair that's below the barrier.

And when the adult looked at something that the infant couldn't see and reacted with interest, whoa look at that, would the infant actually locomote around to come behind the barrier to find out what the adult was looking at? So if they do that, then you can assume that they consciously think something's behind that barrier and they have the intent to find out what it is. So they're part of that communicative exchange. Okay, so the results supported the idea that infants actually did understand what was going on in that situation, so they looked behind the barrier more often in the experimental condition. So they would come around and look behind the barrier to try and find out what was there more often in that condition than in the control condition. Okay, even easier way of doing a barrier study is just to hide things in containers. So get a box, hide a toy in it, and then use your communicative skills to communicate to a child which box the thing is in. So that's what they did in this study. They had a toy in one of two containers, and they either, for some reason, they separated out their cues, so they either pointed to it or they gaze alternated. So this one is when they were gazing, and this one is when they were pointing. thing, either way it doesn't make any difference, infants are able to find the correct box. So you put the toy in the box, there's two boxes here, I'm going to look at that box, the infant opens this box, the point of that box, the infant opens that one. So they are following adult's communicative signals at the end of that infancy period. That's a really simple way to introduce a barrier so that the object's not immediately available, the object doesn't join the infant's attention, it's only the communicative signal that's drawing the infant's attention to the location. And so we might really clearly interpret that as communicative.

Okay. So those are all about referential communication, and there's really clear evidence of that.

I am communicating about a thing happening at the end of infancy at 12 months old. There's one last thing I want to cover, I'm going to do it pretty quickly because we're up against the time and that's about the processing of less basic signals.

So basically about the processing of emotion. But again we return to a classic study that you may well have come across in any development or you can come across in any developmental psychology textbook.

So I can't see my video, I need to do a switch room. Emotion is a non-verbal language.

Emotions reveal the cognition, the understanding of the baby. And furthermore, emotions are the non-verbal communication of the baby towards the parent and the parent towards the baby.

Therefore, I thought that emotions were a royal road, one royal robe to the study of the baby's development. In this study, babies between 9 and 12 months are brought into the lab and placed on a large plexiglass top table. Half of the table has a checkerboard pattern just underneath the surface, but halfway across is a visual clip, which the baby can tell drops off steeply. The plexiglass top continues, so it's perfectly fine to proceed. But the baby isn't so sure, and this is a big drop for a baby just starting to crawl. She wants to get across to get the toy, but she's cautious and looks to the opposite end of the table where her mother is. The parent is instructed to smile or make a fear face. If the mother is posing a fear face, the baby typically does not cross this stair step downward, this modified visual clip or visual step.

On the other hand, if the mother poses a smile or somehow poses a nonverbal communication that is nonprohibitive but encouraging, the child is much more likely to cross over to her.

This particular study demonstrates the role of nonverbal communication in determining the child's behavior in uncertain contexts.

A baby will, when they encounter something ambiguous, something uncertain, will typically lead to the significant other, the mother, the father, a By eleven to twelve months of age the baby is already doing what all of us do when something unusual happens. We look around to figure out how other people are reacting. On the slide I've put a brief summary of the visual clip experiment and what they found so that you have that sort of information on the slide. But all I want to communicate beyond that video today is a ref on his second point there, which is that it's really important that we determine that this is about the need for communication so that infants only do this in an ambiguous situation and it's not just for example when the mum poses an angry face that they think I don't want to go over that side of the cliff because that person, my mum over there is really angry or my mum's really fearful so I'm going to freeze on the spot. and that could be an explanation for how the babies are behaving in the visual cliffs experiment but the reason that we know that that isn't the explanation is because of particular control that they introduced and that was for them to make the cliff itself a less fearful stimulus so when the cliff is high the baby looks to its caregiver to see what am I gonna do here is this alright or is it not alright it feels okay it feels solid but it looks weird and and then they follow what the caregiver's signal is. But crucially, when the cliff is low, so when no fear is perceived, and it's clear that there's not a big drop here and I can move across freely, then infants don't look to their mother for advice.

And even if they do look to their mother for advice, they might hesitate if she looks negative, but they don't stop, they don't freeze, they don't stay where they are, they still crawl across the cliff. So it's about them needing communication in that situation, they need the communication, they seek it and they heed it. So again, pretty clear evidence that we're into that conscious communicative exchange in these 12 months old infants. And that, as I mentioned earlier, is known as social referencing, so we look for other people to show us what to do, as campus said, in those sorts of situations. Okay, so the visual cliff is the absolute classic experiment, obviously it's quite a heavy setup, you need to buy yourself a visual cliff and lots of pear specks.

There have been more modern remakes of the visual cliff situation which also helped to really pinpoint the idea that this is about the infant caring about what the other person is communicating rather than them just being inhibited by someone else being afraid or being angry.

A classic in its own was this experiment by Rapicelli and they had 14 to 18 months old infants and again it's just a box study so they had an adult signal discussed when they opened a box that the infant couldn't see the contents of or randomly they had a tactile task so the adult just put their hand in the boxes and was like disgusted by that. It didn't matter which way, what they found was that the infants avoided the boxes that the adults seemed to signal disgust about and they approached the boxes and opened the boxes that the adults seemed happy about. So again, some bright clear evidence that infants are basing their choices there on the adults' expression. We're going to return to all this evidence when we think about social cognition and theory of mind but in terms of communication, social referencing is suggesting that infants are quite sophisticated at processing other people's signals and that those seek communication when it's necessary. Okay, so when does conscious communication begin? Infants are born into a social world, so right away they're part of the social melee and they look like they're actively reciprocating in social interactions from birth.

They'll imitate people, they'll react negatively when people don't react reciprocally to them.

However those responses might be automatic so they might be inbuilt and sort of hardwired or otherwise egocentric.

When you're within that diatic interaction which just means an interaction between two people where there's no reference it's just me and you looking at each other and having a conversation, it's really difficult to separate who's the person that's communicating and who's the person that's receiving and processing that signal.

It's much more easy to separate out those rules and to dictate at what point someone can take those rules in a situation where there's something that we can share attention on that's beyond us.

Okay, so when I distinguish a reaction from a pro-action in a referential communication context, then I arrive at much clearer evidence for conscious communication than when I try to do that within a normal, natural, social exchange of conversation that doesn't involve a record, which I can't tell if the baby's proactive. It doesn't mean that they're not, it just means that my evidence for that from those situations is less strong. So that's it for today.

Sorry about the sound issue, I'll try and fix it for next week. The recording will go up and if it's not good enough, I'll post last year's recording which covers the same content and I'll see you guys next week. If you've got questions, you can come and ask me. I'm just sort of mindful of time and I'll see you in the limit for five days.