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Fourteen-month-old Infants’ Expectations About Others’ Helping Behavior Woo-yeol Lee, Eun Young Kim, Yoon Kim, Jee Young Yang, & Hyun-joo Song Department of Psychology, Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea

EXPERIMENT (cont.)

INTRODUCTION  Infants show some abilities to help others from the very early stage of their life. • When 14-month-old infants see an adult needing help, they offer relevant help (Warneken & Tomasello, 2007).

Familiarization Trials [Experimental Condition]

[Control Condition]

: The square could climb up the hills while the circle failed to do so and slid down the hill.

: The circle did not show the intent to climb up the hill by simply moving around at the bottom of the hill.

 Infants also possess abilities to understand others’ helping behaviors.

• They distinguish helping behaviors from hindering behaviors and prefer a helpful agent to a malicious one (Hamlin, Wynn, & Bloom, 2007).

 A recent study using the violation-ofexpectation task suggests that 16month-old infants expect an agent to be helpful when the agent sees another in need of aid (Lee et al., 2010).  The present study further investigated whether younger infants also have the same expectation about others’ helping behaviors.

EXPERIMENT Participants  Thirty-one 14-month-old infants were assigned to either experimental condition or control condition.

 The current study suggests that 14month-old infants have an expectation that an agent is willing to help others who are in need.  Remaining questions  What is the origin of infants’ expectation about others’ helpful action?

 Natural disposition or social learning?

 Test Trials

[Helping Event] : The square pushed the circle to the top of the hill.

[Ignoring Event] : The square passed by the

 On what occasions do infants have such expectations?

 Do they always expect helping behaviors of others?  Can their expectation vary with the characteristics of the aid recipients (e.g., previous helper or bystander) ?

circle.

Fig. 1. Video stimuli used in the experiment.

RESULTS • A significant interaction between condition and event, F(1,29) = 4.227, p < .05

Stimuli (See Fig. 1)  The same stimuli as used in Lee et al.(2010). Procedure The infants watched a series of videos which consisted of 4 familiarization trials and 2 test trials. In each trial, a 6-second video was played repeatedly until the infants looked away from the video for 2 consecutive seconds.

DISCUSSION

Fig. 2. Mean looking times during the test trials (sec).

• In the Experimental condition, the infants looked reliably longer at the ignoring event than at the helping event, F(1, 29) = 5.828, p < .05. • In contrast, in the control condition, the infants looked about equally at the two events, F(1, 29) < 1, ns.

March 31, SRCD 2011

REFERENCES Hamlin, J. K., Wynn, K., & Bloom, P. (2007). Social evaluation by preverbal infants. Nature, 450, 557-559. Lee, W., Kim, E. Y., Won, J., Lee, Y., & Kim, Y. (2010, August). Infants expect others to help one another achieve a goal. Poster presented at the 32nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Portland, OR. Warneken, F., & Tomasello, M. (2007). Helping and cooperation at 14 months of age. Infancy, 11(3), 271–294.

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