Social connectedness without eye contact: 18- but not 9-month-olds use proximal touch to infer third-party joint attention during observational learning.

Decades of research have highlighted the important role of joint attention in early cultural learning. However, most previous studies focused on a limited range of joint attention settings involving the learner's participation in joint attention, characterized by eye contact and triadic gaze following. This has created an incomplete picture, tending to neglect the diversity in which infants experience social connectedness in their daily lives.

Parenting culture: A multimethod perspective on parenting practices among the Nso, Cameroon.

Parenting behaviors are studied through various qualitative and quantitative methods, including observations, interviews, and questionnaires, to identify both culturally specific and universal patterns of parents' interactions with their offspring. However, these methods have rarely been combined to systematically investigate methodological convergence and divergence in capturing parenting dynamics. The present study employs a mixed method approach by including video observations, picture card interviews, and parenting ethnotheory questionnaires with a focus on a suburban Nso community in Cameroon, with 51 parents ( = 34 years; 43 mothers and eight fathers) of infants and toddlers ( = 8.

Bonobos respond aversively to unequal reward distributions.

Inequity aversion (IA) is the resistance to unequitable rewards given similar investments. It has been postulated as an important mechanism by which human cooperation thrives. To understand the evolutionary origin of human IA and its distribution across the animal kingdom, many species have been tested on IA, with mixed results.

Investigating the social functions of hurt feelings in middle childhood.

Expressions of hurt feelings are assumed to serve an important social function: communicating that a transgression needs to be repaired. This message is accompanied by a threat to withdraw affection which may motivate the transgressing individual to repair-by increasing interpersonal distance and eliciting feelings of guilt. We investigated the development of this social function of hurt feelings expressed as sulking behavior in direct contrast to related yet distinct emotional expressions (i.

The development of social attention in orangutans: Comparing peering behavior in wild and zoo-housed individuals.

Social learning plays an essential role in all cultural processes, but the factors underlying its evolution remain poorly understood. To understand how socio-ecological conditions affect social learning, we compared peering behavior (i.e.

Children's risk preferences vary across sexes, social contexts, and cultures.

People exhibit more risk-prone behaviors when together with peers than when in private. The interplay of social context effects and other variables that alter human risk preferences (i.e.

Variation in gaze following across the life span: A process-level perspective.

Following eye gaze is fundamental for many social-cognitive abilities, for example, when judging what another agent can or cannot know. While the emergence of gaze following has been thoroughly studied on a group level, we know little about (a) the developmental trajectory beyond infancy and (b) the sources of individual differences. In Study 1, we examined gaze following across the lifespan (N = 478 3- to 19-year-olds from Leipzig, Germany; and N = 240 20- to 80-year-old international, remotely tested adults).

Chimpanzees use social information to acquire a skill they fail to innovate.

Cumulative cultural evolution has been claimed to be a uniquely human phenomenon pivotal to the biological success of our species. One plausible condition for cumulative cultural evolution to emerge is individuals' ability to use social learning to acquire know-how that they cannot easily innovate by themselves. It has been suggested that chimpanzees may be capable of such know-how social learning, but this assertion remains largely untested.

Chimpanzees engage in competitive altruism in a triadic ultimatum game.

Partner choice promotes competition among individuals to be selected as a cooperative partner, a phenomenon referred to as competitive altruism. We explored whether chimpanzees engage in competitive altruism in a triadic Ultimatum Game where two proposers can send offers simultaneously or consecutively to a responder who can only accept one of the two competing offers. In a dyadic control condition only one proposer at a time could send an offer to the responder.

Brain structure and function: a multidisciplinary pipeline to study hominoid brain evolution.

To decipher the evolution of the hominoid brain and its functions, it is essential to conduct comparative studies in primates, including our closest living relatives. However, strong ethical concerns preclude neuroimaging of great apes. We propose a responsible and multidisciplinary alternative approach that links behavior to brain anatomy in non-human primates from diverse ecological backgrounds.

Direct and Observed Joint Attention Modulate 9-Month-Old Infants' Object Encoding.

Sharing joint visual attention to an object with another person biases infants to encode qualitatively different object properties compared to a parallel attention situation lacking interpersonal sharedness. This study investigated whether merely observing joint attention amongst others shows the same effect. In Experiment 1 (first-party replication experiment), = 36 9-month-old German infants were presented with a violation-of-expectation task during which they saw an adult looking either in the direction of the infant (eye contact) or to the side (no eye contact) before and after looking at an object.

Testing Causal Effects of Empathy on Children's Prosociality in Politeness Dilemmas - An Intervention Study.

Empathy is commonly considered a driver of prosociality in child ontogeny, but causal assumptions regarding this effect mostly rely on correlational research designs. Here, 96 urban German children (5-8 years; 48 girls; predominantly White; from mid-to-high socioeconomic backgrounds) participated in an empathy intervention or a control condition before prosocial behaviors (polite lie-telling: rating the drawing as ; prosocial encouragement: utterances interpreted as cheering up the artist) were assessed in an art-rating task. Contrasting children's empathy at baseline with their empathy after the intervention indicated promoted empathy compared to the control group.

TANGO: A reliable, open-source, browser-based task to assess individual differences in gaze understanding in 3 to 5-year-old children and adults.

Traditional measures of social cognition used in developmental research often lack satisfactory psychometric properties and are not designed to capture variation between individuals. Here, we present the TANGO (Task for Assessing iNdividual differences in Gaze understanding-Open); a brief (approx. 5-10min), reliable, open-source task to quantify individual differences in the understanding of gaze cues.

Great ape cognition is structured by stable cognitive abilities and predicted by developmental conditions.

Great ape cognition is used as a reference point to specify the evolutionary origins of complex cognitive abilities, including in humans. This research often assumes that great ape cognition consists of cognitive abilities (traits) that account for stable differences between individuals, which change and develop in response to experience. Here, we test the validity of these assumptions by assessing repeatability of cognitive performance among captive great apes (Gorilla gorilla, Pongo abelii, Pan paniscus, Pan troglodytes) in five tasks covering a range of cognitive domains.

Simulating peers: Can puppets simulate peer interactions in studies on children's socio-cognitive development?

Interactions with peers are fundamental to socio-cognitive development, but assessing peer interactions in standardized experiments is challenging. Therefore, researchers commonly utilize puppetry to simulate peers. This Registered Report investigated urban German children's (Age  = 3.

Copying fidelity of functional and non-functional features in ni-Vanuatu children: A transmission chain study.

Observational learning plays a key role in cultural transmission. Previous transmission chain experiments have shown that children are able to maintain information across multiple generations through observational learning. It still remains unclear how the transmission of functional vs.

Early Trauma Leaves No Social Signature in Sanctuary-Housed Chimpanzees ().

Negative early experiences can have detrimental effects on social functioning in later life, both in humans as well as in other socially-living animals. In zoo-housed chimpanzees, recent evidence suggests that there may be a lingering signature of early trauma on individuals' social interaction tendencies as measured by social proximity and grooming. Here, we address whether a similar effect would be observable in chimpanzees living under semi-wild conditions in an African sanctuary.

Children's consideration of collaboration and merit when making sharing decisions in private.

Young children share equally when they acquire resources through collaboration with a partner, yet it is unclear whether they do so because in such contexts resources are encountered as common and distributed in front of the recipient or because collaboration promotes a sense of work-based fairness. In the current studies, 5- and 8-year-old children from Germany (N = 193) acquired resources either by working individually alongside or by collaborating with a peer. After finding out that the partner's container was empty, they decided in private whether they wanted to donate some resources to the peer.

Chimpanzees organize their social relationships like humans.

Human relationships are structured in a set of layers, ordered from higher (intimate relationships) to lower (acquaintances) emotional and cognitive intensity. This structure arises from the limits of our cognitive capacity and the different amounts of resources required by different relationships. However, it is unknown whether nonhuman primate species organize their affiliative relationships following the same pattern.

The ontogeny of children's social emotions in response to (un)fairness.

Humans have a deeply rooted sense of fairness, but its emotional foundation in early ontogeny remains poorly understood. Here, we asked if and when 4- to 10-year-old children show negative social emotions, such as shame or guilt, in response to advantageous unfairness expressed through a lowered body posture (measured using a depth sensor imaging camera). We found that older, but not younger children, showed more negative emotions, i.

Children over-imitate adults and peers more than puppets.

Researchers commonly use puppets in development science. Amongst other things, puppets are employed to reduce social hierarchies between child participants and adult experimenters akin to peer interactions. However, it remains controversial whether children treat puppets like real-world social partners in these settings.

Expanding the understanding of majority-bias in children's social learning.

Prior experiments with children across seven different societies have indicated U-shaped age patterns in the likelihood of copying majority demonstrations. It is unclear which learning strategies underlie the observed responses that create these patterns. Here we broaden the understanding of children's learning strategies by: (1) exploring social learning patterns among 6-13-year-olds (n = 270) from ethnolinguistically varied communities in Vanuatu; (2) comparing these data with those reported from other societies (n = 629), and (3) re-analysing our and previous data based on a theoretically plausible set of underlying strategies using Bayesian methods.

Conformity decreases throughout middle childhood among ni-Vanuatu children: An intracultural comparison.

Multiple studies have shown that children conform to majorities in perceptual judgment tasks against their better knowledge. However, these studies report contradictory results about how conformity develops over age. Here, we study variation in conformity over the course of middle childhood: we examined potential informational and normative motivations underlying conformity, as well as intracultural variability in their age patterns.

Games and enculturation: A cross-cultural analysis of cooperative goal structures in Austronesian games.

While most animals play, only humans play games. As animal play serves to teach offspring important life-skills in a safe scenario, human games might, in similar ways, teach important culturally relevant skills. Humans in all cultures play games; however, it is not clear whether variation in the characteristics of games across cultural groups is related to group-level attributes.

Chimpanzees consider alternative possibilities.

Humans reason not only about actual events (what is), but also about possible events (what could be). Many key operations of human cognition involve the representation of possibilities, including moral judgment, future planning, and causal understanding. But little is known about the evolutionary roots of this kind of thought.