IUSR
Infants' Understanding of Social Relationships
| Coordinatore | KOZEP-EUROPAI EGYETEM
Organization address
address: Nador utca 9 contact info |
| Nazionalità Coordinatore | Hungary [HU] |
| Totale costo | 155˙804 € |
| EC contributo | 155˙804 € |
| Programma | FP7-PEOPLE
Specific programme "People" implementing the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Community for research, technological development and demonstration activities (2007 to 2013) |
| Code Call | FP7-PEOPLE-2010-IEF |
| Funding Scheme | MC-IEF |
| Anno di inizio | 2011 |
| Periodo (anno-mese-giorno) | 2011-06-01 - 2013-05-31 |
Partecipanti
| # | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 |
KOZEP-EUROPAI EGYETEM
Organization address
address: Nador utca 9 contact info |
HU (BUDAPEST) | coordinator | 155˙804.00 |
Mappa
Word cloud
Esplora la "nuvola delle parole (Word Cloud) per avere un'idea di massima del progetto.
Obiettivo del progetto (Objective)
'Social sciences have long stressed the importance of the capacity to represent social relationships. This project will focus on the early ontogeny of this capacity. Infants' understanding of two basic types of relationships, affiliation and dominance, will be studied. The continuities between infants' and adults' intuitions about social relationships will also be assessed. These investigations will involve a combination of behavioural and eye tracking measures.
The project will be carried out in the Cognitive Development Center of the Central European University. During the completion of the project, its coordinator, who already has expertise in the study of preschoolers’ social cognition, will learn how to study pre-verbal infants. In addition, the project will have several scientific outcomes of general interest. It will contribute to developmental psychology, by providing data in an area of research that has received little attention. By focusing on pre-linguistic infants, it will provide insights on the phylogeny of social relationships understanding. It will also contribute to determine the building blocks of human naïve sociology, a topic of importance for social sciences as a whole.'
Introduzione (Teaser)
Emerging evidence indicates that humans early on in life understand the idea of social structures and social relations. A European study on infants set out to establish how early on this perception is attained.
Descrizione progetto (Article)
It is well established that humans are sociable beings and need to be affiliated with or belong in social groups. Also we recognise social structures and relations as well as the importance of society. However, it is not clear at what stage during development we begin to understand these concepts.
To delineate the perception of social relationships early in development, the EU-funded 'Infants' understanding of social relationships' (IUSR) project designed a series of experiments designed for infants aged between 9 to 15 months. These observational approaches will reveal how infants perceive social interactions and structures.
Infants were shown specific animations that portrayed social dominance and were monitored for their behavioural and eye-based responses. Only 15-month old but not younger babies were capable of understanding this type of relationship. They expected such social dominance to remain stable in different instances of dispute but only in the relationships they had observed.
Also, they were unable to comprehend how physical competence or individual strength could contribute to this type of social interaction. Additionally, 15-month-old infants were capable of perceiving the organisation of social dominance relationships especially in transitive structures. Testing the infant's representation of joint actions to achieve a certain goal will show us how early on in life we form social groups or affiliations.
Overall, the IUSR-collected data provided strong evidence for the early emergence of mechanisms dedicated to represent social entities. They showed that pre-verbal infants go beyond representing their social partners, and also represent social relations and social structures from a third party viewpoint. This information opens up new avenues in social sciences in terms of the origins and theories that humans use to interpret society.