ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2022
Infants infer potential social partners by observing the interactions of their parent with unknown others.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed.
- Infant representations of social relationships: the need to consider the social world.The Behavioral and brain sciences · 2026Article
- Infants use helping to infer the existence and strength of caring relationships.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Young children understand how social connections affect what people know about each other.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- The Cognitive Architecture of Infant Attachment.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2025Review
- Early Neural Development of Social Interaction Perception: Evidence from Voxel-Wise Encoding in Young Children and Adults.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Humans and great apes visually track event roles in similar ways.PLoS biology · 2024Article
- Neural Encoding of Bodies for Primate Social Perception.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Review
- Infants Infer Social Relationships Between Individuals Who Engage in Imitative Social Interactions.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2024Article
- Seeing social interactions.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2023Review
- Human and animal dominance hierarchies show a pyramidal structure guiding adult and infant social inferences.Nature human behaviour · 2023Article
- Infants infer potential social partners by observing the interactions of their parent with unknown others.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Infants are born into networks of individuals who are socially connected. How do infants begin learning which individuals are their own potential social partners? Using digitally edited videos, we showed 12-mo-old infants' social interactions between unknown individuals and their own parents. In studies 1 to 4, after their parent showed affiliation toward one puppet, infants expected that puppet to engage with them. In study 5, infants made the reverse inference; after a puppet engaged with them, the infants expected that puppet to respond to their parent. In each study, infants' inferences were specific to social interactions that involved their own parent as opposed to another infant's parent. Thus, infants combine observation of social interactions with knowledge of their preexisting relationship with their parent to discover which newly encountered individuals are potential social partners for themselves and their families.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.