Infants’ Trait Understanding in Third-Party Collaborative Activities

Abstract

Collaboration is fundamental to our everyday lives and allows humans to function successfully as part of a society. Thus, it is important for us to be able to make decisions about whom to collaborate with. By evaluating the behaviour of others, individuals are able to adjust their own behaviour accordingly and choose a reliable collaborative partner for future collaborative activities. Children begin to collaborate with adults and their peers early on in their lives. An important question is whether children are able to form reputations about others based on third party interactions. Previous research suggests that by 30 months of age, children are able to take into account third party interactions and prefer to approach an experimenter who is nice rather than mean (Herrmann, Keupp, Hare, Vaish & Tomasello, 2012). However, it is not clear when an understanding of traits emerges in a collaborative context. The present research begins to fill this gap by using a novel familiarization eyetracking paradigm. By assessing infants’ expectations about collaboration through observation of third party cooperative activities, this paradigm combines looking time and pupil dilation data to test whether infants form trait judgments in third party cooperative interactions. The results indicate that infants are sensitive to how individuals behave in third party interactions and use that to predict future behaviour. These results indicate that infants are able to use their understanding of collaboration to help them navigate their social world.