Are Eyes Windows to a Deceiver's Soul? Children's Use of Another's Eye Gaze Cues in a Deceptive Situation.

Three experiments examined 3- to 5-year-olds' use of eye gaze cues to infer truth in a deceptive situation. Children watched a video of an actor who hid a toy in 1 of 3 cups. In Experiments 1 and 2, the actor claimed ignorance about the toy's location but looked toward 1 of the cups, without (Experiment 1) and with (Experiment 2) head movement. In Experiment 3, the actor provided contradictory verbal and eye gaze clues about the location of the toy. Four- and 5-year-olds correctly used the actor's gaze cues to locate the toy, whereas 3-year-olds failed to do so. Results suggest that by 4 years of age, children begin to understand that eye gaze cues displayed by a deceiver can be informative about the true state of affairs. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Children's use of the temporal dimension of gaze for inferring preference.

This study examined 4- and 5-year-olds' ability to spontaneously use the relative duration and frequency of another's object-directed gaze for inferring that person's preference. In Experiment 1, analysis revealed a strong age effect for judgment accuracy, which could not be accounted for by cue-monitoring proficiency. Reducing the saliency of the objects in Experiment 2 yielded significant improvement in the younger children's performance. Thus, at 4 years, children already show signs of attending to the temporal dimension of gaze for making mentalistic inferences of preferential liking, but their competence may be undermined by the object choices themselves. By 5 years, they appear to overcome this competition. The obtained developmental difference is discussed in terms of concurrent transitions in attention regulation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Toddlers' attention to intentions-in-action in learning novel action words.

Toddlers' ability to use cues such as eye gaze and gestures to infer the meaning of novel action words was examined. In Experiment 1, 21- and 27-month-olds were taught labels for pairs of videotaped actions that were either similar or dissimilar in appearance. Similar actions differed mainly in the presence of behavioral cues related to the agents' intentions (e.g., extended arms). Only the older children were able to learn the labels for the similar actions. In Experiment 2, 3 new pairs of labels (2 similar, 1 dissimilar) were taught to children in the same age range. Eye gaze and gestures were the main features distinguishing the similar events. The same developmental effect was observed, with only the older children showing learning of both types of verbs and the younger children being impeded by the appearance of the actions. The results show that by the middle of the 2nd year, children begin to consider intentions-in-action when acquiring the meaning of novel action verbs. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Personalized inferences of emotions and appraisals: Component processes and correlates.

Examined children's abilities to consider other people's personal history when inferring their cognitive appraisals and probable emotional reactions. Study 1 explored the sources of children's difficulty in making personalized inferences of emotion. Interviewed children averaging 6, 8, and 11 years of age about a series of stories describing a person's behavior or experience in one situation, followed by a second, related situation, or about partial stories. The youngest children had trouble figuring out mental appraisals from personal history information. Older children were capable of inferring appraisals but had trouble applying them to later situations when both steps were required to infer the person's emotion. Study 2 examined the extent to which social and cognitive factors are associated with the ability to make personalized inferences among 8-year-olds. The tendency to make personalized inferences of appraisals was more clearly associated with sociometric status than with cognitive capacity measures, suggesting that this may be an important element of children's social competence. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Tell-tale eyes: Children's attribution of gaze aversion as a lying cue.

This study examined whether the well-documented adult tendency to perceive gaze aversion as a lying cue is also evident in children. In Experiment 1, 6-year-olds, 9-year-olds, and adults were shown video vignettes of speakers who either maintained or avoided eye contact while answering an interviewer's questions. Participants evaluated whether the speaker was telling the truth or lying on each trial. The results revealed that at both ages, children were more likely to attribute lying to speakers in the gaze aversion condition; however, the effect was significantly greater among 9-year-olds. Significant gender differences were also uncovered, with girls demonstrating strongest sensitivity to the gaze cue. Experiment 2 replicated the gender effect in 6-year-olds but found that when the speakers' verbal responses were removed, boys' use of the gaze cue increased and the gender difference disappeared. These findings indicate that at 6 years old, children interpret interpersonal gaze behavior as a socially informative cue. Furthermore, the growing appreciation of the stereotypic gaze behavior associated with lying and the reputed female advantage in gaze sensitivity may reflect differential processing of multimodal communication. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

There's more to the picture than meets the eye: young children's difficulty understanding biased interpretation

5 experiments investigated children's understanding that expectations based on prior experience may influence a person's interpretation of ambiguous visual information. In Experiment 1, 4- and 5-year-olds were asked to infer a puppet's interpretation of a small, ambiguous portion of a line drawing after the puppet had been led to have an erroneous expectation about the drawing's identity. Children of both ages failed to ascribe to the puppet an interpretation consistent with the puppet's expectation. Instead, children attributed complete knowledge of the drawing to the puppet. In Experiment 2, the task was modified to reduce memory demands, but 4- and 5-year-olds continued to overlook the puppet's prior expectations when asked to infer the puppet's interpretation of an ambiguous scene. 6-year-olds responded correctly. In Experiment 3, 4- and 5-year-olds correctly reported that an observer who saw a restricted view would not know what was in the drawing, but children did not realize that the observer's interpretation might be mistaken. Experiments 4 and 5 explored the possibility that children's errors reflect difficulty inhibiting their own knowledge when responding. The results are taken as evidence that understanding of interpretation begins at approximately age 6 years.     

Gaze perception requires focused attention: Evidence from an interference task.

The direction of another person's gaze is difficult to ignore when presented at the center of attention. In 6 experiments, perception of unattended gaze was investigated. Participants made directional (left-right) judgments to gazing-face or pointing-hand targets, which were accompanied by a distractor face or hand. Processing of the distractor was assessed via congruency effects on target response times. Congruency effects were found from the direction of distractor hands but not from the direction of distractor gazes (Experiment 1). This pattern persisted even when distractor sizes were increased to compensate for their peripheral presentation (Experiments 2 and 5). In contrast, congruency effects were exerted by profile heads (Experiments 3 and 4). In Experiment 6, isolated eye region distractors produced no congruency effects, even when they were presented near the target. These results suggest that, unlike other facial information, gaze direction cannot be perceived outside the focus of attention. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Preschoolers infer ownership from “control of permission”.

Owners control permission—they forbid and permit others to use their property. So it is reasonable to assume that someone controlling permission over an object is its owner. The authors tested whether preschoolers infer ownership in this way. In the first experiment, 4- and 5-year-olds, but not 3-year-olds, chose as owner of an object a character who granted or denied another character permission to use it. In Experiment 2, older 3-year-olds chose as owner of an object a character who prevented another character from using it when prevention was accomplished by controlling permission but not otherwise. Younger 3-year-olds chose between the characters at chance. These findings indicate that preschoolers infer ownership from control of permission. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Preschoolers' understanding of others' desires: Fulfilling mine enhances my understanding of yours.

We developed a gift-giving task requiring children to identify their mother's desire, when her desire differed from theirs. We found a developmental change: 3- and 4-year-olds performed more poorly than 5-year-olds (Experiment 1). A modified version of this task (Experiment 2) revealed that 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds whose desires had been fulfilled chose an appropriate gift for their mothers significantly more often than children whose desires were unfulfilled. Children who merely anticipated desire fulfillment also outperformed children whose desires were unfulfilled. Analysis of children's verbal explanations provides converging evidence that desire fulfillment enhanced children's tendency to adopt the perspective of their mother and justify their choices by referencing her desires. Discussion focuses on why desire fulfillment enhances children's ability to consider the desires of others. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Learning and limits of use of eye gaze by capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella) in an object-choice task.

The ability of 3 capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella) to use experimenter-given cues to solve an object-choice task was assessed. The monkeys learned to use explicit gestural and postural cues and then progressed to using eye-gaze-only cues to solve the task, that is, to choose the baited 1 of 2 objects and thus obtain a food reward. Increasing cue-stimulus distance and introducing movement of the eyes impeded the establishment of effective eye-gaze reading. One monkey showed positive but imperfect transfer of use of eye gaze when a novel experimenter presented the cue. When head and eye orientation cues were presented simultaneously and in conflict, the monkeys showed greater responsiveness to head orientation cues. The results show that capuchin monkeys can learn to use eye gaze as a discriminative cue, but there was no evidence for any underlying awareness of eye gaze as a cue to direction of attention. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Elaborative inferences during reading: Do they occur on-line?

Four experiments were conducted to examine the extent to which readers construct elaborative inferences on-line during reading. In Experiment 1, gaze durations were measured while subjects read anaphors to target antecedents that referenced a particular category member either explicitly or implicitly. When the context strongly suggested a particular category member, gaze durations on an anaphor were the same following either an implicit or an explicit antecedent. When the context did not suggest any particular category member, gaze durations were significantly longer following an implicit antecedent. The results confirmed that, with sufficient context, readers will generate a simple elaborative inference on-line. These results were replicated in Experiment 2 in which the materials did not strongly signal the inference but a sentence designed to encourage subjects to infer was included. In Experiment 3, this "demand sentence" was not included, and readers did not appear to construct the targeted inference. The results of Experiment 4 confirmed that once generated, elaborative inferences are stored as part of the long-term-memory representation of a passage. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

You must see the point: Automatic processing of cues to the direction of social attention.

Four experiments explored the processing of pointing gestures comprising hand and combined head and gaze cues to direction. The cross-modal interference effect exerted by pointing hand gestures on the processing of spoken directional words, first noted by S. R. H. Langton, C. O'Malley, and V. Bruce (see record 1996-06577-002), was found to be moderated by the orientation of the gesturer's head-gaze (Experiment 1). Hand and head cues also produced bidirectional interference effects in a within-modalities version of the task (Experiment 2). These findings suggest that both head-gaze and hand cues to direction are processed automatically and in parallel up to a stage in processing where a directional decision is computed. In support of this model, head-gaze cues produced no influence on nondirectional decisions to social emblematic gestures in Experiment 3 but exerted significant interference effects on directional responses to arrows in Experiment 4. It is suggested that the automatic analysis of head, gaze, and pointing gestures occurs because these directional signals are processed as cues to the direction of another individual's social attention. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The role of semantic context and memory in the acquisition of novel nouns

Three studies assessed the ability of 2-year-olds to use semantic context to infer the meanings of novel nouns and to retain those meanings a day later. In the first experiment, 24 2-year-olds heard novel nouns in sentences that contained semantically constraining verbs (e.g., "Mommy feeds the ferret"). They chose from a set of four novel object pictures to indicate the referent. Children learned a majority of the novel words. However, they occasionally failed to choose the correct object even when they understood the verb. Experiment 2 examined whether this was due to an inability to identify some of the pictures of novel objects. Experiment 3 tested 24 2-year-olds' memory for the newly learned nouns following a 24 hr delay and found significant retention. Results are discussed in terms of learning mechanisms that facilitate vocabulary acquisition in young children.     

Perception of pictorial eye gaze by baboons ( Papio papio).

Pictorial-faces looking left or right were presented to baboons (Papio papio) before the display of a target letter in the left or right hemifield of a monitor screen. Baboons had to provide go or no-go responses taking into account the identity of the target letter. The 1st 6 experiments showed no reliable effect of eye gaze on discrimination speed, using either schematic gazes or pictures of real gazes. Experiment 7 showed that eye gazes facilitated target processing when eye cues were perfect predictors of target location. Findings suggest that baboons do not spontaneously process eye-gaze direction but can learn to do so if the gaze has a predictive value. Implications of these findings on baboons' perspective-taking abilities are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

"What else could he have done?" Creating false answers in child witnesses by inviting speculation.

In 2 experiments (N?=?111 children), a suggestive technique for interviewing child witnesses called "inviting speculation" was examined. Children were presented with atypical actions for common objects in a clown show. One week later, the children were asked to speculate (e.g., "What else could he have done with the knife?") in a between-subjects design on all or none of the items (Experiment 1) and in a within-subjects design on part of the items (Experiment 2), thereby getting highly probable speculations (e.g., "to cut"). After a 3-week delay, the experimenters found more highly probable but not more other false answers for the experimental items (Experiment 2). After a 5–6-month delay, the rate of (unspecified) false answers increased compared with the baseline (Experiments 1 and 2). The short-term effect is explained by a speculation-as-misinformation assumption, whereas the long-term effect is explained by the use of a metastrategy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Setting goals to switch between tasks: Effect of cue transparency on children’s cognitive flexibility.

Three experiments examined the difficulty of translating cues into verbal representations of task goals by varying the degree of cue transparency (auditory transparent cues, visual transparent cues, visual arbitrary cues) in the Advanced Dimensional Change Card Sort, which requires switching between color- and shape-sorting rules on the basis of cues. Experiment 1 showed that 5- and 6-year-old children’s performance improved as a function of cue transparency. Experiment 2 yielded the same pattern of results and showed that cue transparency effects cannot be accounted for by cue format only. Finally, Experiment 3 examined the effect of cue transparency in 7- and 9-year-olds and adults. The effect decreased over age for accuracy performance but not for latencies, suggesting that under some conditions, the difficulty of cue translation can still be observed in individuals whose inner speech is efficient. Overall, these findings showed that goal setting substantially contributes to children’s flexible behaviors and continues to influence adults’ performance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Intact and impaired mechanisms of action understanding in autism.

Typically developing children understand and predict others' behavior by extracting and processing relevant information such as the logic of their actions within the situational constraints and the intentions conveyed by their gaze direction and emotional expressions. Children with autism have difficulties understanding and predicting others' actions. With the use of eye tracking and behavioral measures, we investigated action understanding mechanisms used by 18 children with autism and a well-matched group of 18 typically developing children. Results showed that children with autism (a) consider situational constraints in order to understand the logic of an agent's action and (b) show typical usage of the agent's emotional expressions to infer his or her intentions. We found (c) subtle atypicalities in the way children with autism respond to an agent's direct gaze and (d) marked impairments in their ability to attend to and interpret referential cues such as a head turn for understanding an agent's intentions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effect of organizational cues and strategies on good and poor comprehenders' story understanding.

In two experiments, we investigated the influence of organizational cues on story comprehension by 7- to 8-year-old children, matched in age and decoding skills but differing in comprehension ability. In Experiment 1, children read abstract stories with titles and pictures that did or did not integrate story information. Providing integrative cues improved comprehension by poor, but not good comprehenders, but had no effect on verbatim recall. Both skill groups recalled more main ideas than subsidiary ones. In Experiment 2, two new groups read the stories without pictures or titles. Poor comprehenders trained to look for "clue words" to infer main story consequences, implicit in the stories, showed better comprehension than such children given no training. Good comprehenders performed at a uniformly high level regardless of training. The results are discussed in terms of cognitive control required to select and coordinate information in text. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of signaling inescapable shock on subsequent escape learning: Implications for theories of coping and "learned helplessness."

The present experiments reveal that shuttle-escape performance deficits are eliminated when exteroceptive cues are paired with inescapable shock. Experiment 1 indicated that, as in instrumental control, a signal following inescapable shock eliminated later escape performance deficits. Subsequent experiments revealed that both forward and backward pairings between signals and inescapable shock attenuated performance deficits. However, the data also suggest that the impact of these temporal relations may be modulated by qualitative aspects of the cues because the effects of these relations depended upon whether an increase or decrease in illumination (Experiment 2) or a compound auditory cue (Experiment 4) was used. Preliminary evidence suggests that the ability of illumination cues to block escape learning deficits may be related to their ability to reduce contextual fear (Experiment 3). The implications of these data for conceptions of instrumental control and the role of fear in the etiology of effects of inescapable shock exposure are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The Natural Emergence of Reasoning About the Afterlife as a Developmental Regularity.

Participants were interviewed about the biological and psychological functioning of a dead agent. In Experiment 1, even 4- to 6-year-olds stated that biological processes ceased at death, although this trend was more apparent among 6- to 8-year-olds. In Experiment 2, 4- to 12-year-olds were asked about psychological functioning. The youngest children were equally likely to state that both cognitive and psychobiological states continued at death, whereas the oldest children were more likely to state that cognitive states continued. In Experiment 3, children and adults were asked about an array of psychological states. With the exception of preschoolers, who did not differentiate most of the psychological states, older children and adults were likely to attribute epistemic, emotional, and desire states to dead agents. These findings suggest that developmental mechanisms underlie intuitive accounts of dead agents' minds. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)