The role of learning in infant social cognition

Here is a summary of the project, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council :

This project is concerned with infant social cognition in the first year of life. Research in the last decade has suggested that human infants have precocious social cognitive skills, including goal attribution (understanding others’ behaviour as goal-driven; Woodward, 1998), joint attention (interpreting aspects of the environment in a shared manner with someone else; Poulin-Dubois & Chow, in press) and more recently theory of mind (attributing to someone else beliefs that may be different from one’s own; Song & Baillargeon, 2008). The results have challenged core assumptions in developmental psychology. For example, many believed that Theory of Mind is an ability that only properly emerges around age 4 (Ruffman & Perner, 2005). A fundamental question social development is to determine if complex abilities are present in infants, abilities otherwise masked by traditional tasks, or whether recent studies in fact show more primitive abilities, linked to the more complex ones observed in children. A more radical proposal is that infants are social imposters, and that their social behaviour is not, in fact, social (Povinelli, Prince, & Preuss, 2005). Most studies on infant social cognition use methods based on habituation (decreased responding over repeated stimulation), a form of learning considered «simple» (Sirois & Mareschal, 2002). A problem is that the role of learning is typically eschewed from interpretations of infant behaviour on such tasks (Colombo & Mitchell, 2009). And many have questioned the very suggestion of complex cognitive skills in infants (Cohen, 2004; Kagan, 2008; Jackson & Sirois, 2009), including social cognition (Sirois & Jackson, 2007). This project proposes 5 series of experiments that examine different aspects of social cognition in infants aged 9 and 12 months. The project combines a re-examination of seminal studies (series 1, 2, and 5) and new studies (series 3 and 4). All share strict methodological controls (Sirois & Jackson, 2007) that are cruelly lacking in a majority of recent studies, as well as a focus on learning (Colombo & Mitchell, 2009) in studies of infant social cognition. Each study, and the whole project globally, will help our understanding of the nature and changes associated with social cognition in the first year of life.