Infants use emotion to infer intentionality from non-random sampling events

Infants use statistical information in their environment, as well as others' emotional communication, to understand the intentions of social partners. However, rarely do researchers consider these two sources of social information in tandem. This study assessed 2-year-olds' attributions of...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Cognition and emotion 2022-09, Vol.36 (6), p.1196-1202
Main Authors: Lopez, Lukas D, Walle, Eric A
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Attribution
Child, Preschool
Communication
Disgust
Emotions
Female
Humans
Infant
Infants
Intention
Random sampling
Sadness
Social Perception
Statistical sampling
Statistics
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Summary:Infants use statistical information in their environment, as well as others' emotional communication, to understand the intentions of social partners. However, rarely do researchers consider these two sources of social information in tandem. This study assessed 2-year-olds' attributions of intentionality from non-random sampling events and subsequent discrete emotion reactions. Infants observed an experimenter remove five objects from either the non-random minority (18%) or random majority (82%) of a sample and express either joy, disgust, or sadness after each selection. Two-year-olds inferred the experimenter's intentionality by giving her the object that she had previously selected when she expressed joy or disgust after non-random sampling events, but not when she expressed sadness or sampled at random. These findings demonstrate that infants use both statistical regularities and discrete emotion communication to infer an agent's intentions. In particular, the present findings show that 2-year-olds infer that an agent can intentionally select a preferred an undesired object from a sample as a function of the discrete emotion. Implications for the development of inferring intentionality from statistical sampling events and discrete emotion communication are discussed.
ISSN:0269-9931
1464-0600
DOI:10.1080/02699931.2022.2084040