What Matters in Active Experience? Unique Gaze Patterns Contribute to 10-month-old Infants Understanding of Cooperation

Abstract

Cooperation is an essential character for human surviving and thriving within and across generations. How infants come to understand cooperation is an intriguing question. Empirical evidences demonstrated that infants formed an understanding of the shared goal nature of cooperation only after they had received active training in a similar cooperative event (Henderson, Wang, Matz, & Woodward, 2013). Why this active experience shaped infants’ understanding remains an unanswered question. The present research begins to address this question. Forty-four infants at 10 months of age participated in the study were provided with a brief agentive experience to work cooperatively get a ball out from a box. Following the training experience; infants’ understanding of the cooperation was assessed using a visual habituation paradigm. Of interests is what features in the active experience boosts infants understanding of the shared goal nature of cooperation. Infants’ visual attention and actions in the training were coded and analysed on a frame-by-frame basis. The results revealed that infants would show a greater understanding of cooperation if they exhibited the following behaviours during active experience: 1) spent less amount of time looking at the objects (ball and box) when removing the ball from the box, 2) spent less amount of time looking at the ball (the goal) once it was attained; 3) had more frequent gaze alternations and eye contact with the experimenter in the phase of sharing the cooperative outcome. Surprisingly, no significant effects emerged in regards to infants’ physical contact with the objects and cooperation understanding. The present findings suggested that learning cooperation through active experience is not solely about completing certain actions or achieving the goal. The emphasis of the cooperative training experience is on the process of making comparison and establishing shared intentionality.