A new take on why social cues confuse babies and dogs in a classic hiding game

September 24, 2009

A study by developmental scientists at the University of Iowa and Indiana University challenges the conclusions of two recent studies on how babies and dogs respond to certain social cues. The new findings, published in this Friday's edition of the journal Science, indicate that babies and dogs may not be as clever as the other studies suggest.

Last year, a surprising study led by József Topál of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences showed cues from adults -- like nodding, speaking and pointing -- cause babies to perform worse in a classic toy-hiding game. The September 2008 report in Science suggested that babies have a unique ability to "read" social cues in a way that misled them in this particular task. Then, in a follow-up paper published earlier this month, the same research team reported that dogs, like babies, are confused by social cues -- but wolves aren't. The authors concluded that dogs have become sensitive to social cues from humans due to our shared evolutionary past.

Today's UI and Indiana study used a 10-year-old theory based on how the brain works to provide another explanation for these hiding-and-finding mistakes. Led by John Spencer, professor of psychology in the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and director of the UI Delta Center, the work indicates that babies age 10 months or younger are distracted by social cues -- they focus on adults' faces and gestures rather than paying attention to where the object is hidden and do not have a unique ability, as the earlier study suggested.

Because dogs show a similar pattern of behavior with social cues present, the computer model used by Spencer's team can explain their behavior, too. Spencer and his colleagues suspect that wolves succeed in this task for the same reasons older babies do -- they can form a robust memory for the hiding location. They say this makes particular sense given that the experimenters hid bits of food in the study with wolves.

"You don't often see cases in which the same data are interpreted in such fundamentally different ways," he said. "We say the infants and the dogs are easily distracted by social cues and the wolves are the clever ones; they say the infants and the dogs have a special ability to process social cues, and the wolves are inferior. It's exactly the opposite. It will be interesting to see where that tension takes us."

The studies in question examine a classic error made by babies up to 10 months old. When they repeatedly see an object hidden in one spot, they look for it there. Even when they witness it being hidden somewhere else, they continue to search in the original hiding location. By age 1, figure it out. This odd "A-not-B" error is the subject of five decades of research. Discovered by child psychologist Jean Piaget, it's a staple topic in developmental psychology courses and covered in parenting books.

Topál and his team are among the first to investigate how social cues influence babies' and other animals' performance on the task. Spencer considers the studies provocative but has concerns.

"It's against our intuition that social cues seem to hurt the infants' performance -- you'd think encouragement from adults would be helpful. And it shows that social cues make a difference," he said. "But we disagree with the explanations put forth that are not grounded in what we know about infants' perceptual and cognitive abilities. This is, after all, a hiding and finding game -- attention and memory should matter."

To show how attention and memory matter in this task, Spencer and colleagues ran computer simulations of a theory that was originally published in 1999 by co-author Linda Smith and her colleagues from Indiana University. This theory has explained infants' performance in many different versions of the A-not-B task. In the paper published this Friday in Science, Spencer and colleagues show that when the computer model fails to focus on the hiding event because distracting social cues are present, it shows the same behavior as infants.

"Research indicating that infants or dogs are extraordinary in some way tends to make a splash. We like to think our kids and pets are special, and in many ways they are," he said. "But in our view, there is no special ability at play here. Using neural network models, we demonstrated that other mundane things underlie infants' behavior. Infants and dogs are simply being distracted by social cues in this hiding game."

Spencer and his co-authors, UI postdoctoral researcher Evelina Dineva and Linda B. Smith, a chancellor's professor of psychological and brain sciences at Indiana University, propose a particular lesson from the debate. They want to see a move away from explanations that only explain a specific result -- how infants interpret in a hide-and-seek game -- toward more comprehensive explanations that bring a host of findings together.

"This has been one of the really powerful aspects of our theory -- it has unified a diverse array of findings with infants in this task and with older children in related memory tasks. Our paper nicely illustrates a new extension into the social domain," Spencer said. "In our view, this is something to celebrate -- that we can bring social cognition together with basic cognitive processes. The downside, of course, is that infants, and by analogy , don't have a special mind-reading ability. For some people, that's an unpleasant pill to swallow."

Source: University of Iowa (news : web)

4.7 /5 (3 votes)  

Filter


Move the slider to adjust rank threshold, so that you can hide some of the comments.


Display comments: newest first

RayCherry
Sep 25, 2009

Rank: not rated yet
Is it possible that at this stage of social development that they may be testing the information for truth?

I have read before that children develop the capacity for lying at a surprisingly early age.

Does it follow that they learn to distinguish truth and lies at an earlier stage of development?

In the case of domesticated versus wild canines, it is said that domesticated dogs do not grow into full adults. That, socially speaking, domesticated dogs are puppies during their entire lives, whereas environment cues push wild dogs beyond that point of development. However, I don't know if this holds for domestic dogs of all mature ages.
SDMike
Sep 27, 2009

Rank: not rated yet
I don't know if wolves lie. But, well socialized dogs certainly lie. Dogs can use social interactions with humans to distract the human from some event or object the dog doesn't want the human to see/find.

I'd like to know if dogs use their "human" social skills when interacting with other dogs.
gwrede
Oct 15, 2009

Rank: not rated yet
What is common for babies and dogs, and not wolves? Wolves don't try to please adults. And that's the whole thing here.

Of course the child and dog assume that they're supposed to look at the object in the "usual" place. Why else would the adult waste that much energy repeatedly hiding it in the former place?

At 1 years the kid has learnt that adults kid them, and that they get more applause by outwitting stupid games, so they know the adult is expecting them to go to the usual place, but (correctly) expect a bigger reward by going to the second place.

Rank 4.7 /5 (3 votes)
Related Stories
Relevant PhysicsForums posts
  • Is Everyday Technology Killing Us?
    createdFeb 08, 2012
  • Exercise and weight loss
    createdFeb 08, 2012
  • Why do we have head aches? Our brains can't feel anything.
    createdFeb 07, 2012
  • "The end of diseases" by David Agus, interview from Daily Show with Jon Stewart
    createdFeb 04, 2012
  • Oncolytic adenovirus
    createdFeb 04, 2012
  • Nutrition label stuffs and diets
    createdFeb 02, 2012
  • More from Physics Forums - Medical Sciences

More news stories

Human cognitive performance suffers following natural disasters, researchers find

Not surprisingly, victims of a natural disaster can experience stress and anxiety, but a new study indicates that it might also cause them to make more errors - some serious - in their daily lives. In their upcoming Human Fa ...

Medicine & Health / Psychology & Psychiatry

created 30 minutes ago | popularity not rated yet | comments 0

Both maternal and paternal age linked to autism

Older maternal and paternal age are jointly associated with having a child with autism, according to a recently published study led by researchers at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth).

Medicine & Health / Psychology & Psychiatry

created 3 hours ago | popularity not rated yet | comments 0 | with audio podcast

Curry spice component may help slow prostate tumor growth

Curcumin, an active component of the Indian curry spice turmeric, may help slow down tumor growth in castration-resistant prostate cancer patients on androgen deprivation therapy (ADT), a study from researchers ...

Medicine & Health / Cancer

created 4 hours ago | popularity 5 / 5 (3) | comments 0 | with audio podcast

Team isolates nerve cells involved in storing long term memory and gene proteins associated with them

(Medical Xpress) -- A research team in Taiwan has succeeded in isolating two nerve cells in fruit fly brains that are believed to be the major players in allowing for the formation of long term memories. Furthermore, ...

Medicine & Health / Neuroscience

created 5 hours ago | popularity 5 / 5 (4) | comments 1 | with audio podcast report

Seeing colors in music, tasting flavors in shapes may happen in life's early months

Famed violinist Itzhak Perlman sees a deep forest green whenever he plays a B-flat on his Stradivarius' G string. The A on the E string is red.

Medicine & Health / Psychology & Psychiatry

created 6 hours ago | popularity 4.5 / 5 (2) | comments 0 | with audio podcast


The power of estrogen -- male snakes attract other males

A new study has shown that boosting the estrogen levels of male garter snakes causes them to secrete the same pheromones that females use to attract suitors, and turned the males into just about the sexiest ...

Putting the squeeze on planets outside our solar system

(PhysOrg.com) -- Using high-powered lasers, scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and collaborators discovered that molten magnesium silicate undergoes a phase change in the liquid state, abruptly ...

New error-correcting codes guarantee the fastest possible rate of data transmission

Error-correcting codes are one of the triumphs of the digital age. They’re a way of encoding information so that it can be transmitted across a communication channel — such as an optical fiber o ...

Humans may have helped the decline of African rainforests 3000 years ago

(PhysOrg.com) -- Large areas of rainforests in Central Africa mysteriously disappeared over three thousand years ago, to be replaced by savannas. The prevailing theory has been that the cause was a change ...

Fool's gold may prove an unlikely alternative to overexploited catalytic materials

Catalytic materials, which lower the energy barriers for chemical reactions, are used in everything from the commercial production of chemicals to catalytic converters in car engines. However, with current catalytic materials ...

Could Venus be shifting gear?

(PhysOrg.com) -- ESA’s Venus Express spacecraft has discovered that our cloud-covered neighbour spins a little slower than previously measured. Peering through the dense atmosphere in the infrared, the ...