Social Perception

Infants demonstrate remarkable social cognitive abilities that allow them to perceive what others are doing and learn by observation. Our focus is on three areas: infant’s ability to predict the goal of other people’s actions, their ability to follow the direction of other people’s gaze, and their ability to detect and process emotional facial expressions. Additional studies assess the long-term consequences of these early emerging abilities and/or how they are affected by the culture and family context.

Most of these studies rely on eye-tracking. We present movies to infants and let their gaze inform us about what how they perceive and interpret other people’s actions.