ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2022
The pupillometry of the possible: an investigation of infants' representation of alternative possibilities.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 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
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Children's Representations of Possibility: Uncertainty About "What" Is Easier Than Uncertainty About "Where".Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2026Article
- Can chimpanzees conceive of mutually exclusive future possibilities? A Comment on: 'Chimpanzees prepare for alternative possible outcomes' (2023), by EngelmannBiology letters · 2024Article
- A Continuity in Logical Development: Domain-General Disjunctive Inference by Toddlers.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2024Article
- Pupillometry as a window to detect cognitive aging in the brain.Biomedical engineering letters · 2024Article
- The pupillometry of the possible: an investigation of infants' representation of alternative possibilities.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Thinking about possibilities: mechanisms, ontogeny, functions and phylogeny.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Representations of Abstract Relations in Infancy.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2022Article
- The Inverted U: Exploring the Interconnectedness of Movement and Cognitive Function Across the Lifespan.Wiley interdisciplinary reviews. Cognitive scienceReview
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Contrasting possibilities has a fundamental adaptive value for prediction and learning. Developmental research, however, has yielded controversial findings. Some data suggest that preschoolers might have trouble in planning actions that take into account mutually exclusive possibilities, while other studies revealed an early understanding of alternative future outcomes based on infants' looking behaviour. To better understand the origin of such abilities, here we use pupil dilation as a potential indicator of infants' representation of possibilities. Ten- and 14-month-olds were engaged in an object-identification task by watching video animations where three different objects with identical top parts moved behind two screens. Importantly, a target object emerged from one of the screens but remained in partial occlusion, revealing only its top part, which was compatible with a varying number of possible identities. Just as adults' pupil diameter grows monotonically with the amount of information held in memory, we expected that infants' pupil size would increase with the number of alternatives sustained in memory as candidate identities for the partially occluded object. We found that pupil diameter increased with the object's potential identities in 14- but not in 10-month-olds. We discuss the implications of these results for the foundation of humans' capacities to represent alternatives. This article is part of the theme issue 'Thinking about possibilities: mechanisms, ontogeny, functions and phylogeny'.
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