Amanda L. Woodward - US grants

DESCRIPTION: The proposed research will explore the development of infants' responses to actions carried out by others. The experiments all make use of the visual-habituation method. In preliminary research, the investigator has found that, at 9 and (to perhaps a lesser extent) 5 months of age, infants selectively encode the goal of grasping actions performed by a hand; other actions, such as pointing to an object, or touching an object with the back of the hand, are not selectively encoded, nor are actions performed by inanimate objects (e.g., a rod or crane). Further results showed that 12-month-old infants do selectively encode pointing actions. These results suggest that young infants have a system of knowledge to guide their reasoning about human actions, which undergoes development during the first year. The proposed experiments explore the nature and development of this knowledge. They explore: 1) infants' responses to a wide range of actions and corresponding inanimate functional relations; 2) infants' ability to categorize actions as goal-directed or not; 3) infants' ability to integrate information from simultaneous actions; and, finally, 4) infants' responses to means-end sequences involving two distinct actions on two distinct objects. Taken together, these experiments should contribute to our understanding of what are the roots in infancy of early psychological knowledge.

[unreadable] DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The fact that language is a conventional system, used by all speakers in a community to convey the same meanings, underlies our success as communicators and provides the basis for acquiring language. The proposed research will investigate the origins of key aspects of conventionality during the period in which the first words are acquired. First, these studies will provide some of the first experimental work investigating when infants recognize conventionality in language. Second, this research will examine the generality of infants' assumptions by comparing word use to other types of human action. Third, by testing infants' understanding of newly introduced words, the project will assess the degree to which infants' understanding of conventionality contributes to word learning. Finally, because the proposed experiments distinguish between different aspects of conventionality, the project will bring greater precision to current thinking on this topic. The proposed studies are intended to provide initial vantage points into 3 aspects of conventional knowledge: (1) Knowing that all speakers (within a community) use the same form-meaning pairings; (2) Knowing that these pairings form a contrastive system; and (3) Knowing that conventional systems can, in principle, vary across speakers. In addition to providing a foundation for further investigations, these studies will shed new light on general processes in early language learning. As such, the findings may contribute to scientific and professional knowledge about cases in which development goes awry, for example, in cases of language delay, or more global communicative deficits such as those present in autism. In addition, because these studies concern the development of knowledge about the systems shared by language communities, the findings may ultimately contribute to our understanding of multi-lingual language development. [unreadable] [unreadable] [unreadable]

Effective learning from social partners requires that children interpret other people's actions not as purely physical motions through space, but rather in terms of their underlying goals or intentions. With support from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Woodward will investigate the origins of this foundational ability during infancy. Recent studies have developed a technique for using infants' patterns of attention as evidence about their understanding of the actions they observe. Results from this technique have revealed that infants understand the goal-directed nature of some actions, including grasping, tool use, and acts of attention (i.e., looking). The current studies will use the same technique to investigate the experiences and processes that contribute to infants' understanding of others' goals. In particular, the studies evaluate the possibility that infants' own actions provide a basis for the insight that others' actions are goal-directed. To address this issue, these studies examine the effect of experimentally induced experience on infants' action knowledge. Research questions concern the relative effects of first-person and observational experience, as well as the extent to which infants generalize what they have learned from these experiences to new situations. These studies will provide the first systematic investigation of the effects of learning to act on infants' understanding of others' actions.

This work will yield new insights into social knowledge and its dynamic emergence in early development. By situating infant cognitive development within the larger context of infants' emerging competence as agents in the physical and social worlds, this research will provide new insights into processes of cognitive development during infancy. More generally, this research is part of a growing movement to study the role of learning in infants' conceptual development. In addition, the findings will inform understanding of knowledge acquisition in social settings because concepts of intention support many aspects of social learning. This research is also relevant to understanding cases in which development goes awry. Deficits in social reasoning have been implicated in developmental disorders including autism, asperger's syndrome, and conduct disorder. Discovering the processes that create social understanding in typically developing children will inform scientific and clinical understanding of these developmental disorders.

Human language is both universal within the species and highly variable across populations. This Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) project will train young scientists and engineers to understand language diversity by combining the tools of behavioral, computational and biological research, drawing upon an extensive collaborative network that spans nine departments in five colleges at the University of Maryland. The project aims to promote sustainable change in the science of language by building infrastructure for interdisciplinary research on diverse languages through local and international collaborations and outreach efforts, by strengthening links between basic science and clinical and engineering applications, and by building awareness of the science of language through high school and undergraduate partnerships. The training plan provides coursework, research training, and an environment geared towards preparing students for interdisciplinary research and equipping them to build collaborative networks in their future careers. Preparation for interdisciplinary research will be provided by broad coursework, integrative pro-seminars and a post-candidacy lab rotation that will pair trainees with students from other disciplines. A central component of the project is the Winter Storm, an intensive two-week workshop that will provide foundational skills training, research planning, and professional development. The project will enhance the use of computational and neuroscientific techniques in studies of atypical language and second language learning, and will partner with an NSF-supported Science of Learning Center based at Gallaudet University that focuses on visual language. IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating U.S. Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the interdisciplinary background, deep knowledge in a chosen discipline, and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education by establishing innovative new models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries.

Humans are an intensely social species, and this fact is evident even at the earliest points in development. Infants are highly attentive to their social partners and cognitively engaged with them. In particular, research over the last decade has revealed that young infants view others' behavior not as purely physical movements but rather as actions structured by the person's goals and states of attention. This sensitivity to the goal structure of action is fundamental to human experience and critical for social and cognitive development. However, current findings do not tell us whether and how infants recruit this sensitivity to others' goals in order to predict their actions in real time. Anticipating others' goal-directed actions is essential for many forms of social coordination, including one-on-one social interactions, collaborative activities and communication. This project will address this gap in the literature by investigating infants' ability to visually predict a person's next action based on information about his or her prior goals and focus of attention. By using a remote eye-tracking system to record infants' gaze shifts as they view actions on a video monitor, the studies will investigate the range of situations in which infants of different ages can generate action predictions. In addition, the studies will explore two potential contributors to the development of action prediction -- infants' own experience producing well-structured actions and infants' sensitivity to linguistic information about a person's goals. In this way, the project will both document the emergence of action prediction during infancy and provide insights into the developmental processes that contribute to this ability in infants.

This project will provide foundational insights into a critical and largely unstudied aspect of social competence in infants. More broadly, this work will inform our understanding of social, cognitive and linguistic development because it will shed light on the social-cognitive processes that undergird young children's social learning in these domains. The experiments will also develop new research methods for assessing social information processing in infants. Because the eye-tracking methods developed in these studies can also be adapted for use with broader populations, this research will lay the foundation for comparative work across ages, populations, and possibly species. These eye-tracking methods may be particularly useful in participants who have limited abilities to respond to verbal instructions, such as individuals with autism. By elucidating the early development of an important aspect of social cognition, this work may also yield important insights into understanding clinical disorders that involve deficits in social reasoning, social attention, and the on-line interpretation of others' actions (for example, autism and conduct disorder).

Objectives The objectives of the administrative core are to (1) provide budgetary and logistical support for each of the Projects, (2) recruit infant, child and adult participants for Projects I, II and IV; (3) support the programmatic and synergistic activities of the research teams from across the Projects; (4) support outreach activities related to the project.

Converging evidence from across laboratories and approaches has documented the existence of shared neural representations for the perception and production of action (termed mirror neurons or the mirror neuron system, MNS) in adult nonhuman and human primates. Although it is widely hypothesized that the MNS supports the development of social perception and social responses, there is little direct investigation of these possibilities. The proposed experiments address this issue by investigating the potential role of the MNS in the development of two foundational social abilities: action anticipation, the ability to generate predictions about the outcomes of others' actions, and goal imitation, the ability to reproduce the meaningful components of others' actions. The first goal of the proposed research is to use behavioral methods to test the hypothesis that developing action production systems support infants' abilities to anticipate and imitate others' actions. To this end. Panel 1 develops eye-tracking measures of action anticipation and Panel 2 develops behavioral measures of goal imitation. Each panel will investigate relations between the focal ability and infants' own developing actions, as well as the effects of motor training and motor interference. In addition, drawing on insights from Project III, these studies will test whether infants' anticipatory and imitative responses are modulated by the contextual factors that modulate mirror neuron function in primates. The second goal of the proposed research is to implement these measures in studies that assess the neural processes that correlate with infants' action anticipation and goal imitation. The studies in Panel 3 pursue this goal by integrating the behavioral measures developed in Panels 1 and 2 with electroencephalogram (EEG) studies of mu rhythm suppression, a neural response that has been argued to reflect MNS activation. To achieve this goal, the studies will draw on methods developed in Projects I and IV. In addition to addressing these two primary research goals, the data from these experiments will be recruited to inform the development of computational models in Project IV.

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Two fundamental abilities are central to adaptive human functioning and human development: the ability to deploy actions strategically in service of goals and the ability to apprehend the goals of social partners in order to produce appropriate social responses. Recent neuroscientific findings indicate that these foundational capacities are intimately related: A neural network known as the mirror neuron system (MNS) responds both when we perform an action and when we observe someone else perform that action. These findings hold the potential to revolutionize scientific understanding of the ontogeny of goal-directed action and social-cognitive functioning. However, progress in realizing this potential has been held back by the lack of neural measures of MNS activity in infants, a lack of integrated measures of social-cognitive functions in infants, and the need to develop models of MNS dynamics during development. The Program Project proposed here addresses these needs: Project I will develop EEG methods for assessing MNS activity in human infants, children, and adults as well as infant and adult monkeys. These methods will provide a unified methodological core for the remaining projects. Projects II &III will investigate the social-cognitive functions of the MNS in human infants and infant and adult monkeys, integrating measures of social cognitive functioning with the neural measures developed in Project 1. Project IV will develop a neurocomputational model of the developing MNS, integrating data across all projects. Administrative Core A will provide budgetary and logistical support for each project, provide participant recruitment (Project I, II, IV), and support integrative and outreach activities. EEG/Computational Core B will provide facilities and expertise to support the deployment of the methods developed in Project I across the other projects. This large-scale collaboration emerges from ongoing collaborative work across these laboratories that has laid the groundwork and developed initial methods for taking the program to the next level. The products of this work will provide critical new insights into the development of foundational human capacities as well as innovative new tools, approaches and insights for broader developmental, comparative, and clinical research.

Children depend on others to learn language, to learn how to act in culturally appropriate ways, and to learn to engage with the physical environment effectively. A great deal of current research has focused on identifying the aspects of social interaction that foster these kinds of learning. Some theorists have proposed that child-directed interactions are critical. In these interactions, the adult and child engage together in visual attention while the adult directly addresses the child to communicate relevant information (e.g., the name of an object, or the proper use of an artifact). These interactions have been argued to be the critical foundation from which human social learning and culture emerge. Support for this conclusion comes from findings demonstrating that children show enhanced attention and learning when they are directly engaged by adults as compared to when they simply observe an adult's actions. However, these findings come exclusively from cultural populations where children are regularly engaged in directed interactions by caregivers. Thus, it is unknown 1) whether directed communication is a universal feature of early learning environments or is particular to certain communities and, 2) whether children's heightened proclivity to learn from directed interaction is a universal constant, or simply corresponds to the typical day-to-day experiences that children growing up in some communities have.

The proposed studies will address these issues by exploring the presence of child directed communication, and its role in informing early learning for 18-month-old children from two cultural communities: A Yucatec Mayan community, where children may have many opportunities to observe others, and a U.S. community, where children may regularly experience directed interactions with caregivers. If directed interactions are critical for early social learning, then children in each culture should show heightened learning from directed versus observed experiences regardless of the prevalence of directed interactions in their own experience. Alternatively, if children's social learning is shaped by their regular social experience, Mayan children may show heightened learning in response to observed models, and even U.S. children's ability to learn from observed models may vary as a function of variation in their opportunities to observe others' actions. These studies will provide a strong test of whether child directed interactions are, in fact, the cradle of human social learning, or whether, instead, early social learning is a more flexible process, driven by the broader ability to understand others' intentional actions, and shaped by regularities in the child's social experience.

This research program will be the first to test the relation between cultural experience and early learning from directed interaction and from observation. As such, it is uniquely positioned to answer questions about the relative importance that direct engagement has for early learning. This understanding is critical for informing theoretical accounts of early development, as well as for shaping policy decisions regarding the most effective means to teach children who come from diverse environmental backgrounds. Further, the proposed studies will develop a set of experimental paradigms that can be used across different cultural communities, setting the stage for future comparative work on early development in populations that have not been heavily studied before.

Objectives The objectives of the administrative core are to (1) provide budgetary and logistical support for each of the Projects, (2) recruit infant, child and adult participants for Projects I, II and IV; (3) support the programmatic and synergistic activities of the research teams from across the Projects; (4) support outreach activities related to the project.

? DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Human children learn a great deal from their interactions with social partners, including language, cultural norms, and artifact use among other relevant social cognitive abilities. Learning from others requires at least two kinds of abilities in the learner - the ability to represent others' actions as intentional and the ability o use this knowledge very quickly in real time. In the first year of life, converging evidence from passive experimental methods suggests that preverbal infants have an understanding of others' intentions and goals (Guajardo & Woodward, 2004; Woodward, 1998, 1999); however, these same infants may not appear as sophisticated in their knowledge of others during naturalistic interactions that require fast responses. Between 12 and 24 months of age, infants show increasing skill in fine-grained social interactive abilities (social competence), which is a development supported by empirical evidence from naturalistic social interactions (Bakeman & Adamson, 1984; Buttelmann, Carpenter, & Tomasello, 2009). One possibility is that this difference in social competence between years 1 and 2 is not driven primarily by infants' knowledge of the intentions of others; rather, it is that infants become more adept at recruiting this knowledge quickly (Goal Prediction Speed) during social interactions to produce appropriate responses to others. The current proposal will examine how skilled 18-month-old infants are at integrating social knowledge about others (social competence) and whether their speed in responding (Goal Prediction Speed) aids in their development of social skills that are evident in the second year of life. Infants' social competence will be measured with a series of tasks designed to elicit the following behaviors: helping; sharing; joint attention; perspective-taking; and general cognitive ability. Their performance on these tasks will be correlated with a Goal Prediction Speed measure that has been developed within our lab. In this measure, infants' ability to rapidly recruit information about a past event to predict a person's future behavior, as measured through their latency to launch a goal-based predictive fixation, will be examined in an anticipatory looking paradigm using a T60 XL Tobii eye-tracking system. Thus, this proposal will provide a novel measure of social competence by correlating infants' speed when generating goal-based predictions with their performance on social competence measures. Consistent with NICHD's mission of ensuring that all children have the opportunity to achieve their full potential for healthy and productive lives, the current project will shed light on infans' developing social competence, a multidimensional ability that encompasses social, cognitive, and behavioral skills that allow infants to effectively navigate their social world.

The ability to understand other people's goals and intentions is critical for social competence. A key component of this is interpreting the reasons for others' actions. Infants appear to be able to determine others' goals based on observing others' actions early in life, and this sensitivity to others' goals is associated with developments in infants' own ability to perform goal-based actions. The purpose of this project is to investigate the neural and cognitive systems that support infants' emerging sensitivity to goal-based actions in themselves and others. This work will shed new light on how neurocognitive development supports early social cognition.

The proposed studies will record electroencephalogram (EEG), a technique for recording the brain's electrical activity, while 8- to 10-month-old infants perform actions on objects, when they perform joint actions with others, and when they observe others' actions. A first goal of the research is to characterize the neural processes that are involved when infants learn to engage in new actions and social collaborations. A second goal is to test the prediction that these neural processes also support infants' understanding of others' goal-directed actions. To address these issues, the research will evaluate networks of neural activity as infants act and observe others' actions, and will assess whether these patterns of neural activity predict when infants are able to respond appropriately to others' goal-directed actions. Beyond addressing the focal research questions, the proposed studies will generate new approaches to analyzing infant neural and cognitive development, and the findings of these studies with typically-developing infants may help to shed light on developmental disorders that affect social cognition and social behavior. The project will provide unique multidisciplinary training opportunities for students and postdoctoral researchers.

Project II- Project Summary The mirror neuron system (MNS) has been hypothesized to broadly influence social cognitive development, but research has just begun to evaluate the nature and significance of these effects early in life. The proposed work in Project II seeks to elucidate the learning mechanisms that support early motor learning and social perception as well as the broader role that the MNS may play in supporting social-cognitive development. These issues are addressed in three aims, each of which involves recruiting behavioral data as well as electroencephalogram (EEG) measures of MNS function supported by Core B: Aim 1: Investigate the neural correlates and behavioral consequences of action learning in infants. Our prior results suggest that the MNS is plastic during early development, changing as a function of long-term motor experience, and that this plasticity may involve both long-term and short-term learning effects. Aim 1 investigates the neural and behavioral correlates of short- and long-term action training in order to shed light on how the processes involved in the initial stages of action learning relate to those that emerge with longer-term expertise as well as the behavioral functional significance of MNS activity at each timescale. Aim 2. Investigate the role of the MNS in supporting infants? social interactive competence. A foundational set of social abilities emerges in the second year, including imitative learning, helping, and communicative skill, and these skills require rapid responses to others? goal-directed actions. Research with adults has shown that the MNS supports rapid responses to others? actions, raising the possibility that this may also occur during early development. To investigate this possibility Aim 2 will investigate the effects of action priming on infants? imitation, helping, and communicative behavior, as well as the neural correlates of these social behaviors. Aim 3. Investigate longitudinal relations between early MNS activity and later social abilities. As yet, the longer-term developmental implications of MNS activity have not been studied in human infants. In Aim 3, we will follow infants longitudinally from 12 to 30 months, assessing individual variation in early MNS activity as a predictor of later-emerging social skills. Across these three aims, we will consider the role that the social context may play in modulating the MNS and the functions it supports. Most research to date has focused on the effects of motor experience. However, emerging evidence suggests that social experience may also be an important modulator of the MNS. Social interventions, and measures of social interaction with caretakers, will be used to evaluate the potential effects of social experience on the MNS and the social-cognitive functions it may support.