Past work has shown that eye movements are affected by long-term memory across different tasks and instructional manipulations. In the current study, we tested whether these memory-based eye movements persist when memory retrieval is under intentional control. Participants encoded multiple scenes with six objects (three faces; three tools). Next,…

This study aimed to investigate how mothers and infants contribute mutually to breastfeeding. The spontaneous interactions of 20 breastfeeding dyads were video-recorded at home, at 2, 4, 6, 9 and 12 months of infants' life. Mothers' and infants' gaze and tactile behaviour, facial expressions of emotion, and dyadic expressions were continuously…

The present study investigated whether Mandarin-speaking preschool children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) were able to use prosodic cues to understand others' communicative intentions. Using the visual world eye-tracking paradigm, the study found that unlike typically developing (TD) 4-year-olds, both 4-year-olds with ASD and 5-year-olds…

Previous research suggests that Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) might be associated with impairments on implicit but not explicit mentalizing tasks. However, such comparisons are made difficult by the heterogeneity of stimuli and the techniques used to measure mentalizing capabilities. We tested the abilities of 34 individuals (17 with ASD) to…

ASD is associated with mentalizing deficits that may correspond with atypical mirror system (MS) activation. We investigated MS activity in adults with and without ASD when inferring others' intentions using TMS-induced motor evoked potentials (MEPs) and mu suppression measured by EEG. Autistic traits were measured for all participants. Our EEG…

The development of theory of mind (ToM) in infancy has been mainly documented through studies conducted on a single age group with a single task. Very few studies have examined ToM abilities other than false belief, and very few studies have used a within-subjects design. During 2 testing sessions, infants aged 14 and 18 months old were…

Young children use pedagogical cues as a signal that others' actions are social or cultural conventions. Here we show that children selectively "transmit" (enact in a new social situation) causal functions demonstrated pedagogically, even when they have learned and can produce alternative functions as well. Two-year-olds saw two novel…

During the first year of life, infants possess some of the key social--cognitive abilities required for success in a social world: Infants interpret others' actions in terms of their intentions and can use this understanding prospectively to generate predictions about others' behavior. Exactly how these foundational abilities develop is currently…

Background: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has proposed modifying the Nutrition Facts Label (NFL) on food packages to increase consumer attention to this resource and to promote healthier dietary choices. Aims: The present study sought to determine whether the proposed NFL changes will affect consumer attention to the NFL or purchase…

This article elucidates the unfolding of 3 phases of cognitive development through which typical children move during the first 2 years of life to illuminate the interrelationships among early cognition, communicative intention, and word-learning strategies. The resulting theoretical framework makes clear the developmental prerequisites for social…

Traditional looking-time paradigms are often used to assess infants' attention to sociocognitive phenomena, but the link between these laboratory scenarios and real-world interactions is unclear. The current study investigated hypothesized relations between traditional social-cognitive looking-time paradigms and their real-world counterparts…

Four experiments investigated whether infants and adults infer that a novel entity that interacts in a contingent, communicative fashion with an experimenter is itself an intentional agent. The experiments contrasted the hypothesis that such an inference follows from amodal representations of the contingent interaction alone with the hypothesis…

Ideomotor theory considers bidirectional action-effect associations to be the fundamental building blocks for intentional action. The present study employed a novel pupillometric and oculomotor paradigm to study developmental changes in the role of action-effects in the acquisition of voluntary action. Our findings suggest that both 7- and…

Typically developing (TD) infants could capitalize on social eye gaze and social contexts to aid word learning. Although children with autism disorder (AD) are known to exhibit atypicality in word learning via social eye gaze, their ability to utilize social contexts for word learning is not well understood. We investigated whether verbal AD…

Visual exploration is driven by two main factors--the stimuli in our environment, and our own individual interests and intentions. Research investigating these two aspects of attentional guidance has focused almost exclusively on factors common across individuals. The present study took a different tack, and examined the role played by individual…