What are we interested in?
In the Social Understanding Program our research centers around 2 main issues:

As adults, we are quite adept at reading other people's intentions and desires from their actions.  For example, if we were to see a person reaching for and grasping their coffee mug, we might infer that person wants a sip of coffee.  We understand and remember this action not in terms of the actual physical motion that took place, but rather in terms of the person's underlying psychological states. In our center, we investigate the infant origins of the ability to understand a person's intentions from their actions.

From the time they are born, infants love to watch people, and they learn many important things by doing this. They see their parents, siblings, and others moving around, looking at objects, picking things up, using "tools" (such as can openers, TV remotes, and keys), and communicating with one another. These actions might be confusing for infants because there is a lot of information to attend to. Adults avoid this confusion by focusing their attention on the "key" features of the action. In particular, we focus on the person's goals or intentions in acting. For example, imagine a mother walking across the living room and then reaching down to pick up a toy that has been dropped on the floor. We could think about this action in terms of each physical motion that took place -- the motions involved in each step, the motions involved in crouching down, how the arm moved through space toward the toy, et cetera. Rather than considering all of these details, however, we are likely to zoom in on the fact that the goal of the action is to retrieve the toy. Our studies ask whether infants also focus on the goals of actions.

How do we know what babies are thinking?
Clearly, we can not read a baby's mind and they certainly can not tell us in words what they are thinking.  But they do give us pretty strong clues as to what they may be thinking by how long they look at objects and events.  In most of our studies, we simply record how long babies look at simple events.  Our studies are based on a very simple premise that is true for both babies and adults.  If you see an event numerous times, your interest in it will decline.  This is called habituation.  But when a new event is seen, your interest level will increase.  This is called dishabituation.  We show babies the same event happening over and over again.  Once they habituate to the event, as measured by their decreased looking time, we make changes to the  original event.  Because we know that infants will look longer at an event which seems new to them, we can use their attention to the changed events as evidence about the kinds of changes infants notice.

In our studies, infants see simple events in which a person acts on an object. For example, they might see a person reach across a table top to grasp a toy. We repeat this event until the baby habituates to it. Then, we show the baby test events which differ from the first event either in the details of the action (e.g., the path of motion taken by the person's arm) or in the goal of the action (the toy that is grasped). In the past we have found that by about 6 months of age, infants look longer when there is a new goal than when the other details of the grasp have changed. Therefore, infants seem to understand this action, grasping, in terms of the person's goals.
 

 

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