Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In order to understand social relationships, humans must recognize cues of affiliation. When infants see interactionsbetween abstract, animated characters, they use imitation, helping, comforting, and exerted effort to predict who willapproach whom. Moreover, infants attend to and reach for characters who imitate other characters and those who helpothers. The present research builds on these findings and asks whether infants reach for human-animated puppets withdistinct and variable human voices who imitate, are imitated by, comfort, are comforted by, or move synchronously with aperson. At 12 months, infants reached more often for puppets who imitate a humans sound, and also for those who werenot targets of imitation. In contrast, infants did not reach more for puppets who comforted or synchronized their motionswith a human actor. By 12 months, therefore, infants show differentiated responses to different acts of social engagementby those whose social interactions they observe as third parties.