Reactive and anticipatory looking in 6-month-old infants during a visual expectation paradigm

The capacity to process and incorporate temporal information into behavioural decisions is an integral component for functioning in our environment. Whereas previous research has extended adults’ temporal processing capacity down the developmental timeline to infants, little research has examined infants’ capacity to use that temporal information in guiding their future behaviours and whether this capacity can detect event-timing differences on the order of milliseconds. The present study examined 3- and 6-month-old infants’ ability to process temporal durations of 700 and 1200 milliseconds by means of the Visual Expectation Cueing Paradigm in which the duration of a central stimulus predicted either a target appearing on the left or on the right of a screen. If 3- and 6-month-old infants could discriminate the milliseconds difference between the centrally-presented temporal cues, then they would correctly make anticipatory eye movements to the proper target location at a rate above chance. Results indicated that 6- but not 3-month-olds successfully discriminated and incorporated events’ temporal information into their visual expectations. Brain maturation and the perceptual capacity to discriminate the relative timing values of temporal events may account for these findings. This developmental limitation in processing and discriminating events on the scale of milliseconds, consequently, may be a limiting factor for attentional and cognitive development that has not previously been explored.

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Evolutionary foundations of knowledge and belief attribution in nonhuman primates

Behavioral and Brain Sciences ◽

10.1017/s0140525x20001521 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 44 ◽

Author(s):

Fumihiro Kano ◽

Josep Call

Keyword(s):

Nonhuman Primates ◽

Great Apes ◽

False Belief ◽

Belief Attribution ◽

Belief Attributions ◽

Anticipatory Looking

Abstract Recent findings from anticipatory-looking false-belief tests have shown that nonhuman great apes and macaques anticipate that an agent will go to the location where the agent falsely believed an object to be. Phillips et al.'s claim that nonhuman primates attribute knowledge but not belief should thus be reconsidered. We propose that both knowledge and belief attributions are evolutionary old.

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Components of Visual Orienting in Early Infancy: Contingency Learning, Anticipatory Looking, and Disengaging

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience ◽

10.1162/jocn.1991.3.4.335 ◽

1991 ◽

Vol 3 (4) ◽

pp. 335-344 ◽

Cited By ~ 283

Author(s):

Mark H. Johnson ◽

Michael I. Posner ◽

Mary K. Rothbart

Keyword(s):

Age Of Onset ◽

Age Groups ◽

Spatial Location ◽

Contingency Learning ◽

Significant Evidence ◽

Anticipatory Eye Movements ◽

General Terms ◽

Visual Orienting ◽

The Right ◽

Anticipatory Looking

Three aspects of the development of visual orienting in infants of 2, 3, and 4 months of age are examined in this paper. These are the age of onset and sequence of development of (1) the ability to readily disengage gaze from a stimulus, (2) the ability to consistently show “anticipatory” eye movements, and (3) the ability to use a central cue to predict the spatial location of a target. Results indicated that only the 4--month-old group was easily able to disengage from an attractive central stimulus to orient toward a simultaneously presented target. The 4--month-old group also showed more than double the percentage of “anticipatory” looks than did the other age groups. Finally, only the 4--month-old group showed significant evidence of being able to acquire the contingent relationship between a central cue and the spatial location (to the right or to the left) of a target. Measures of anticipatory looking and contingency learning were not correlated. These findings are, in general terms, consistent with the predictions of matura-tional accounts of the development of visual orienting.

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Top-Down Cortical Influences in Visual Expectation

The 2006 IEEE International Joint Conference on Neural Network Proceedings ◽

10.1109/ijcnn.2006.246678 ◽

2006 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

S.L. Bressler ◽

C.G. Richter ◽

Yonghong Chen ◽

Mingzhou Ding

Keyword(s):

Top Down ◽

Visual Expectation

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Is implicit Theory of Mind real but hard to detect? Testing adults with different stimulus materials

Royal Society Open Science ◽

10.1098/rsos.190068 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 6 (7) ◽

pp. 190068 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Louisa Kulke ◽

Marieke Wübker ◽

Hannes Rakoczy

Keyword(s):

Theory Of Mind ◽

Eye Tracking ◽

Implicit Theory ◽

Implicit Methods ◽

New Methods ◽

Stimulus Materials ◽

Anticipatory Looking

Recently, Theory of Mind (ToM) research has been revolutionized by new methods. Eye-tracking studies measuring subjects' looking times or anticipatory looking have suggested that implicit and automatic forms of ToM develop much earlier in ontogeny than traditionally assumed and continue to operate outside of subjects’ awareness throughout the lifespan. However, the reliability of these implicit methods has recently been put into question by an increasing number of non-replications. What remains unclear from these accumulating non-replication findings, though, is whether they present true negatives (there is no robust phenomenon of automatic ToM) or false ones (automatic ToM is real but difficult to tap). In order to address these questions, the current study implemented conceptual replications of influential anticipatory looking ToM tasks with a new variation in the stimuli. In two separate preregistered studies, we used increasingly realistic stimuli and controlled for potential confounds. Even with these more realistic stimuli, previous results could not be replicated. Rather, the anticipatory looking pattern found here remained largely compatible with more parsimonious explanations. In conclusion, the reality and robustness of automatic ToM remains controversial.

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