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Helping and cooperation are central to human social life. Here, we report two studies investigating these social behaviors in children with autism and children with developmental delay. In the first study, both groups of children helped the experimenter attain her goals. In the second study, both groups of children cooperated with an adult, but fewer children with autism performed the tasks successfully. When the adult stopped interacting at a certain moment, children with autism produced fewer attempts to re-engage her, possibly indicating that they had not formed a shared goal/shared intentions with her. These results are discussed in terms of the prerequisite cognitive and motivational skills and propensities underlying social behavior.

Humans are unique in their propensity for helping. Not only do we help others in need by reacting to their requests, we also help proactively by assisting in the absence of a request. Proactive helping requires the actor to detect the need for help, recognize the intention of the other, and remedy the situation. Very little is known about the development of this social phenomenon beyond an urban, industrialized setting. We examined helping in nineteen two- to five-year old children in small-scale rural villages of Vanuatu. In the experimental condition, the intentions of the experimenter were made salient, whereas in the control condition they were ambiguous. Children helped more often in the experimental compared to the control condition, suggesting that the propensity to monitor others’ goals and act accordingly can be detected in different cultural contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When enforcing norms for cooperative behavior, human adults sometimes exhibit in-group bias. For example, third-party observers punish selfish behaviors committed by out-group members more harshly than similar behaviors committed by in-group members. Although evidence suggests that children begin to systematically punish selfish behavior around the age of 6 y, the development of in-group bias in their punishment remains unknown. Do children start off enforcing fairness norms impartially, or is norm enforcement biased from its emergence? How does bias change over development? Here, we created novel social groups in the laboratory and gave 6- and 8-year-olds the opportunity to engage in costly third-party punishment of selfish sharing behavior. We found that by age 6, punishment was already biased: Selfish resource allocations received more punishment when they were proposed by out-group members and when they disadvantaged in-group members. We also found that although costly punishment increased between ages 6 and 8, bias in punishment partially decreased. Although 8-y-olds also punished selfish out-group members more harshly, they were equally likely to punish on behalf of disadvantaged in-group and out-group members, perhaps reflecting efforts to enforce norms impartially. Taken together, our results suggest that norm enforcement is biased from its emergence, but that this bias can be partially overcome through developmental change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Robots should be capable of interacting in a cooperative and adaptive manner with their human counterparts in open-ended tasks that can change in real-time. An important aspect of the robot behavior will be the ability to acquire new knowledge of the cooperative tasks by observing and interacting with humans. The current research addresses this challenge. We present results from a cooperative human–robot interaction system that has been specifically developed for portability between different humanoid platforms, by abstraction layers at the perceptual and motor interfaces. In the perceptual domain, the resulting system is demonstrated to learn to recognize objects and to recognize actions as sequences of perceptual primitives, and to transfer this learning, and recognition, between different robotic platforms. For execution, composite actions and plans are shown to be learnt on one robot and executed successfully on a different one. Most importantly, the system provides the ability to link actions into shared plans, that form the basis of human–robot cooperation, applying principles from human cognitive development to the domain of robot cognitive systems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The current response discusses the insightful commentaries by Dale Hay (2009) and Karen Wynn (2009) on the proposal that human altruism has deep roots both in phylogeny and ontogeny (Warneken & Tomasello, 2009). In particular, I focus on (a) what observational and experimental methods can reveal about altruistic motivations in children, (b) Wynn's idea that early altruism might confer a selective advantage to the infants themselves, and (c) how recent findings on young children's social ontology will enable us to test the hypothesis that ontogeny proceeds from rather global to more differentiated altruistic behaviours. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human infants as young as 14 to 18 months of age help others attain their goals, for example, by helping them to fetch out-of-reach objects or opening cabinets for them. They do this irrespective of any reward from adults (indeed external rewards undermine the tendency), and very likely with no concern for such things as reciprocation and reputation, which serve to maintain altruism in older children and adults. Humans' nearest primate relatives, chimpanzees, also help others instrumentally without concrete rewards. These results suggest that human infants are naturally altruistic, and as ontogeny proceeds and they must deal more independently with a wider range of social contexts, socialization and feedback from social interactions with others become important mediators of these initial altruistic tendencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In two studies, the authors investigated 2- and 3-year-old children's awareness of the normative structure of conventional games. In the target conditions, an experimenter showed a child how to play a simple rule game. After the child and the experimenter had played for a while, a puppet came (controlled by a 2nd experimenter), asked to join in, and then performed an action that constituted a mistake in the game. In control conditions, the puppet performed the exact same action as in the experimental conditions, but the context was different such that this act did not constitute a mistake. Children's normative responses to the puppet's acts (e.g., protest, critique, or teaching) were scored. Both age groups performed more normative responses in the target than in the control conditions, but the 3-year-olds did so on a more explicit level. These studies demonstrate in a particularly strong way that even very young children have some grasp of the normative structure of conventional activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human children 18–24 months of age and 3 young chimpanzees interacted in 4 cooperative activities with a human adult partner. The human children successfully participated in cooperative problem-solving activities and social games, whereas the chimpanzees were uninterested in the social games. As an experimental manipulation, in each task the adult partner stopped participating at a specific point during the activity. All children produced at least one communicative attempt to reengage him, perhaps suggesting that they were trying to reinstate a shared goal. No chimpanzee ever made any communicative attempt to reengage the partner. These results are interpreted as evidence for a uniquely human form of cooperative activity involving shared intentionality that emerges in the second year of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Merit is a key principle of fairness: rewards should be distributed according to how much someone contributed to a task. Previous research suggests that children have an early ability to take merit into account in third-party situations but that merit-based sharing in first-party contexts does not emerge until school-age. Here we provide evidence that three- and five-year-old children already use merit to share resources with others, even when sharing is costly for the child. In Study 1, a child and a puppet-partner collected coins that were later exchanged for rewards. We varied the work-contribution of both partners by manipulating how many coins each partner collected. Children kept fewer stickers in trials in which they had contributed less than in trials in which they had contributed more than the partner, showing that they took merit into account. Few children, however, gave away more than half of the stickers when the partner had worked more. Study 2 confirmed that children related their own work-contribution to their partner’s, rather than simply focusing on their own contribution. Taken together, these studies show that merit-based sharing is apparent in young children; however it remains constrained by a self-serving bias., Psychology

Humans actively share resources with one another to a much greater degree than do other great apes, and much human sharing is governed by social norms of fairness and equity. When in receipt of a windfall of resources, human children begin showing tendencies towards equitable distribution with others at five to seven years of age. Arguably, however, the primordial situation for human sharing of resources is that which follows cooperative activities such as collaborative foraging, when several individuals must share the spoils of their joint efforts. Here we show that children of around three years of age share with others much more equitably in collaborative activities than they do in either windfall or parallel-work situations. By contrast, one of humans’ two nearest primate relatives, chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), ‘share’ (make food available to another individual) just as often whether they have collaborated with them or not. This species difference raises the possibility that humans’ tendency to distribute resources equitably may have its evolutionary roots in the sharing of spoils after collaborative efforts., Psychology

As many studies of cognition and behavior involve captive animals, assessing any psychological impact of captive conditions is an important goal for comparative researchers. Ferdowsian and colleagues (2011) sought to address whether captive chimpanzees show elevated signs of psychopathology relative to wild apes. They modified a checklist of diagnostic criteria for major depression and posttraumatic stress disorder in humans, and applied these criteria to various captive and wild chimpanzee populations. We argue that measures derived from human diagnostic criteria are not a powerful tool for assessing the psychological health of nonverbal animals. In addition, we highlight certain methodological drawbacks of the specific approach used by Ferdowsian and colleagues (2011). We propose that research should (1) focus on objective behavioral criteria that account for species-typical behaviors and can be reliably identified across populations; (2) account for population differences in rearing history when comparing how current environment impacts psychological health in animals; and (3) focus on how changes in current human practices can improve the well-being of both captive and wild animals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]