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This study explores 12-month-olds' understanding of face-to-face conversation, a key contextual structure associated with engagement in a social interaction. Using a violation-of-expectations paradigm, we habituated infants to a 'face-to-face' conversation, and in a test phase compared their looking times between 'back-to-back' (conceptually novel) and 'face-to-face' (conceptually familiar) conversations, while simultaneously manipulating perceptual familiarity in a 2 × 2 factorial design. We also analyzed dynamic changes in pupil dilation, which are considered a reliable measure of cognitive load that may index processing of social interactions. Infants looked relatively longer at perceptual changes (new speaker positions) but not at conceptual change (back-to-back conversation), suggesting that face-to-face conversation may not elicit particular expectations, and so may not carry any particular conceptual significance. Moreover, on the first test trial, larger pupil dilation was observed for familiar conditions, suggesting that familiarity with perceptual features could enhance processing of conversations. Thus, this study undermines assertions regarding infants' conceptual understanding of the social signals underlying engagement. Infants may rather recognize such signals through their perceptual familiarity and associated positive feelings. This may then increase their engagement when observing and participating in others' collaborative activities, in turn allowing for the development of knowledge regarding others' intentions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The violation-of-expectation (VOE) paradigm and related methods are the main tools used to study high-level cognition in preverbal infants. Infants’ differential looking to conceptually implausible/impossible events has been used as an index of early cognitive competence in many areas, including object knowledge, physics, language, and number. However, an event's plausibility is commonly confounded with its perceptual novelty or familiarity, leading to a variety of interpretations for looking time data ( Bogartz, Shinskey & Speaker, 1997 ). This illustrative study demonstrates the value of factorial designs, in which perceptual (novelty–familiarity) and conceptual (possible–impossible) variables are independently and jointly explored. It also introduces pupil dilation as a viable and complementary dependent measure to study infant cognition. We show that pupil data can assist in the interpretation of otherwise equivocal looking time data. The discussion focuses on methodological considerations in infancy research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews early precursors to social cognition in infancy, then critically reviews infancy work suggesting goal attribution to human agents in the first year of life and theory of mind (ToM) abilities (assessed through a modified false belief task) in the second year of life. Overall, methodological problems and statistical limitations compound data interpretation, which would be equivocal despite these limitations. The authors find no support for high-order social cognitive abilities in infancy. The discussion focuses on how the field of social cognition in infancy should build theories from the bottom up, assessing how simpler precursors change over time and combine to give rise to socially competent individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]