Alan Leslie - US grants

Cognitive processing in infants has been shown to span a small set of concurrently individuated objects, allowing infants to attend to relations between objects and, within limits, to attend to object numerosity. Some current findings from the study of infancy seem to parallel findings in object-based attention in adults. These parallels have inspired the "object indexing" framework for studying aspects of the infant object concept which, in turn, has yielded a set of hypotheses concerning how infants might attend to physical objects. One general and long term aim of this research is to draw together the study of the "object concept" in infants and objectbased theories of attention in adults.

Using standard familiarization-test looking times measures, a series of experiments will probe processes underlying infant object individuation and identification. A key process in object cognition is object individuation - the representation of a specific numerosity of objects in a scene. There is evidence that infants in the first year can individuate up to a small number of physical objects in a given scene but it remains unclear what is the representational basis of this ability. Two mutually compatible possibilities are investigated here: the representations may be numerical in character; the representations may be indexical (and non-numerical) in character. Attempts will be made to gather evidence for both types of representational mechanism.

A second specific aim is to investigate the relation between object individuation and object identification in infants. If individuation is the initial establishment of a distinct object representation, then identification addresses whether the object is one that has been encountered before. Although these processes are closely related, it is, useful to distinguish them. Current work shows that under some circumstances infants can individuate objects without subsequently being able to (re)identify them. This gives rise to seemingly paradoxical cases where featural information used as the basis for individuation decisions fails to be used for identification decisions. The object indexing model accounts for these cases by linking identification to the key process of feature binding. Drawing inspiration from object-based theories of attention in adults, the object indexing model requires that featural information be attached to object indexes by a non-default process of binding. Experiments are proposed to reveal the nature of the infant object representation and to probe the development of feature binding in infants from 6 to 13 months of age.

Finally, experiments are proposed for an initial investigation of the hypothesis that working memory systems are the location for the construction of object indexes and for the binding of featural information to indexes. Data on the early development of these processes will provide the foundations for building a detailed cognitive model. Such a model would be a landmark accomplishment in developmental cognitive science.
This proposal will advance our knowledge of one of the fundamental structures of human thought by exploring connections between the infantile ability to track persistent individual objects in a changing world and object-based mechanisms of selective attention.

This project supports a workshop on the topic of how children come to understand norms, rules, and obligations: a social cognition of norms. The workshop will bring together scholars who are leaders in the fields of moral development and theory of mind. While moral development research has, over the last 20 years, documented the richness of children's knowledge of principles of justice, fairness, and rights, only recently have moral development researchers started asking how children's psychological understandings inform their moral thinking. During the same time period, there has been an extensive research program on children's knowledge about others' psychological states, referred to as "theory of mind". Parallel to the new directions in moral development research, an emerging direction for theory of mind research is exploring the relation between normative and psychological construals of human action. Surprisingly, there has been little collaboration between researchers on children's moral development and researchers on children's theory of mind, despite the extensive lines of research in these two respective areas and the potential conceptual overlaps. The charge of this workshop will be to explore how those perspectives together generate a deeper understanding of the social cognition of normative relations. If the goal is to develop a full account of how children develop the abilities to use and form norms, rules, permissions, and obligations, what are the key concepts and distinctions? The challenge is to define a field of reasoning about norms, and to encourage researchers to view existing questions in this new light.

A multidisciplinary research team will study various aspects of the nature of moral judgments and the causal factors for the capacity for cross-cultural variation and change. The project measures the nature of moral decisions across different time periods (evolutionary, developmental, and cultural) and among different test populations (nonhuman animals, normal and neurobiologically impaired human infants and adults, and different cultures). It uses different methods for each type of study including experiments of primates, large-scale internet studies, and neuropsychological investigation of patients. The investigators will to study two psychological factors: (1) The idea that intending to harm another as a means to the greater good is less permissible than harming merely as a foreseen side effect (the intention principle) and (2) The idea that acts that cause harm to others will be perceived as morally worse than omissions of an act that causes equivalent harm (the omission principle). Studies of these principles will be conducted with nonhuman primates and human infants to test the hypothesis that some of the core cognitive building blocks that are necessary for these principles (e.g., perceiving intentions and goals) are in place but only take on moral significance in our own species, and only later in child development. The investigators will test the hypothesis that these principles are universal but with cross-cultural variation in their specific content (e.g., who can be harmed) by using both large-scale internet-based studies as well as studies of hunter-gather and subsistence-based societies. They will test the hypothesis that governments can impose explicit laws that alter how people behave yet these explicit norms do not penetrate people's intuitive moral judgments. The investigators also will examine how neural insult systematically changes the nature of particular moral judgments among patient populations (i.e., autistics, individuals with damage to the frontal lobes and amygdala).

The project is expected to enhance basic understanding of how humans evolved the capacity to deliver moral judgments, how such judgments change over development and across cultures, and how the capacity breaks down following selective neural insult. Results from this project are likely to be useful in the arenas of justice, public policy, education, and clinical treatment, showcasing the biological and psychological mechanisms that humans bring to the moral table, and how they respond to policy that may be at odds with their intuitive moral sense. The project also will provide education and training opportunities for graduate students, including students from minority groups and developing nations.

As a species, human beings are distinguished by an advanced social intelligence. We perceive in ourselves and in others an inner life of goals, fears, hopes, beliefs, imaginings, and longings. By sharing our inner lives, we cooperate, compete, and communicate in ways that are impossible for any other species and that remain a distant dream for even the most advanced computer systems. Although central to human nature, the ability to share our inner lives only began to be studied by cognitive psychologists in the 1980's and by neuroscientists in the 1990's. Many advances have been made since then in understanding the cognitive and brain bases of what is called our "theory of mind" ability. Theory-of-mind abilities can be experimentally demonstrated in typically developing 4-year-old children, while older and otherwise capable children and adolescents with autism are unable to pass the same tasks. The severe social and communicative impairments in autism may stem from a failure of theory of mind to develop in the brain. Although typically developing children do not generally demonstrate theory-of-mind abilities using traditional tasks until age four (with younger children failing such tasks), recent evidence demonstrates that infants show some aspects of this ability when measured with nonverbal tasks. These seemingly discrepant findings suggest that typically developing babies may have an unconscious and intuitive version of theory-of-mind abilities previously associated only with four-year-olds. If so, typical social development may depend upon the unfolding of a natural theory-of-mind 'instinct' that is expressed first at an intuitive, unconscious, and non-verbal level in the brain. Failure of developing brain systems to express this early 'instinct' may characterize autistic spectrum disorders. This project investigates these ideas by using a variety of experimental methods some of which probe spontaneous, intuitive (or "implicit") responses to social scenarios such as eye-gaze and looking behaviors, as well as traditional, more deliberative (or "explicit") measures such as answers to verbal questions about similar scenarios. Neurologically typical children will be studied in several age groups, from infants to older preschoolers, as well as children with autism. Through a multi-population, multi-method approach the project will reveal how multiple theory-of-mind systems interact in developing brain systems and how unconscious cognition gradually comes to connect with conscious verbal knowledge.

The project integrates research with teaching and service to the broader community. Post-doctoral, graduate, and undergraduate students, including minorities and individuals from developing nations, are fully involved each year. Findings are disseminated not only through scholarly publications and meetings, but also through public lectures and through old and new media, including the internet. The project will help uncover the deep roots of human sociality and, by revealing how it develops, will enrich understanding of the foundations of human culture, the capacity for education and law, the social transmission of knowledge, children's and adults' intuitive social sense, and the nature of autistic spectrum disorders.