Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Infants are born into rich social networks and are faced with the challenge of learning about them. Previous research shows that infants learn about individuals when they observe their social interactions, but it is not clear whether they infer their social dispositions, their social relationships to one another, or both. The current studies address this question in 12-month-old infants and 16- to 18-month-old toddlers who observe social interactions involving imitation. In Studies 1 and 3, infants and toddlers expected that imitators, compared to non-imitators, would respond to their social partners’ distress. Likewise, they expected the targets of imitation, compared to non-targets, to respond to their partner’s distress. In Study 2, these expectations did not generalize to interactions with a new partner, providing evidence that infants learned about the relationships between individuals as opposed to their dispositions. In Study 3, infants’ did not make predictions about responses to laughter, suggesting that infants see imitation as indicative of a specific kind of social relationship. Together, these results provide evidence that infants and toddlers learn about the social relationships of unknown individuals by observing interactions involving imitation.