4. Rodney Tompkins finds that 4- and 5-year-old children take risk and protection into account when evaluating caregivers who help or hinder their kids. I'll also talk about this work (& other findings) in Symposium 1 on caregiving: osf.io/preprints/ps...

3. Coxi Jiang finds that the strength of relationships, not just their valence, guides adults' predictions about vicarious emotional responses to others' experiences (i.e. empathy & counter-empathy): osf.io/preprints/ps...

2. Bill Pepe finds that infants expect helpers and hinderers to act the same way in a new context -- but only toward the same target, not a new one. This suggests they infer the actors' relationships, not their dispositions.
CogSci: osf.io/preprints/os...
Expanded manuscript: osf.io/preprints/ps...

Here's a quick rundown of the 4 papers we'll be presenting:

1. Tori Hennessy makes the case (using unpublished, reanalyzed data from my PhD and postdoc) that infants learn to recognize conventional actions, and that these are the actions they expect group members to share: osf.io/preprints/ps...

Instead, they learn that who the helper has positive relationships with, and what the relative strength or priority of those relationships is.

Or so we think :). Let us know what you think!

And come see Bill talk about this at CogSci! The current work grew out of this paper: osf.io/preprints/os...

Together, this suggests infants do learn from helping & hindering, but they aren't learning who is good/nice vs. bad/mean. (At least from this pattern of initial evidence, with all helping & hindering toward one target, which is common in other studies).

Second, infants could make transitive inferences about the helper's strength of care. After they saw the helper help: 1) target A when A was alone, 2) target B over A, 3) target C over B, infants then saw test trials with targets A & C. They expected the helper to help C.

First, infants' expectations for consistent future behavior were target-specific. After they saw actors help and hinder a target in one context, they expected the helper & not the hinderer to help in a new situation that featured the same target, but not one that featured a new target.

Two patterns of evidence in infants’ expectations led us to conclude that infants take helping as evidence of a positive helper-target relationship, not a broader social or moral disposition (all expts w/ 14-15 mo old infants, N=52, preregistered):

Thanks for the shout out :) We have high hopes that the efficiency of the measure will make it easier to ask questions that involve denser sampling, e.g. about the dynamics of WTRs or their distribution across social networks.

💔

Congrats, Chujun, we’ll miss you 🥲