Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Anthropological observations suggest that specific sharingbehaviors may predictably covary with specific relationalcontexts, and thus can be used as relationally informativecues. Given their limited social experiences, cultural novices,such as infants, should be particularly likely to rely on thesecues to discover the relational makeup of their socialsurroundings on the basis of sparse observations. The presentstudy examines a particular hypothesis derived from thisproposal, namely that infants interpret giving as indicative ofsocial relations based on the principle of even balance. Bysystematically contrasting infants’ representation of giving tothat of superficially similar taking events, we showed that 12-month-olds, despite being equally likely to infer dyadicrelations from the observation of either transferring action(Exps. 1-4), infants encoded the direction of resource transferonly in the representation of giving (Exp. 5-6), and,conversely, transitively inferred novel relations only forsocial structures composed of taking relations (Exp. 7-8). Webelieve that the distinct inferences elicited by the observationof the two transferring actions reflects fundamentaldifferences in the models regulating the relations respectivelyinferred: one (for giving) based on a principle of evenbalance, which motivates the monitoring of changes inresource flow in the ongoing relation; the other (for taking),based on a principle of social equivalence, which gives rise totransitive social structure.