Investigating the Role of Gaze Cues on the Communication-Induced Memory Bias

In this conceptual replication study, we used a screen-based violation of expectation (VOE) paradigm to investigate whether 9-month-old infants process different information about novel objects when an object is introduced in a communicative referential versus non-communicative referential context (Yoon, Johnson, & Csibra et al., 2008; Okumura, Kobayashi, & Itakura, 2016; but see Silverstein, Gliga, Westermann, & Parise, 2018). In 12 test trial videos, an object was shown together with one adult (action phase). We manipulated the communicative context depicted in the videos such that the adult either looked at the object after looking in the direction of the infant (communicative context) or the actor looked at the object individually without addressing the infant at all (non-communicative). After each video, the scene was occluded before it revealed one of three different outcomes: the object infants had just seen in the action phase (no change, baseline), the object they had just seen but at a novel position (location change), or a new object (identity change). By manipulating both the communicative context and features of the object in the subsequent outcome phase, we aimed to conceptually replicate the previous finding that observed communicative context may bias infants to encode surface features which support learning about object kinds (i.e., object identity) over spatial-temporal information (i.e., object location). In contrast to previous studies examining this effect, we used a study setup and data processing procedure allowing us to automatically extract infants’ looking response using eye tracking technology instead of manually coding infants’ looking behavior.

Note: In the overall study (published in Open Mind: https://doi.org/10.1162/opmi_a_00114) we refer to this project as “Experiment 1”. This OSF project is directly linked to the OSF project "Investigating the Communication-Induced Memory Bias in the Context of Third-Party Social Interactions" (https://osf.io/mp9td/).

在本项概念复制研究中，我们运用基于屏幕的预期违反（VOE）范式，旨在探究九个月大的婴儿在物体以交流性指涉或非交流性指涉语境下被引入时，是否处理有关新颖物体的不同信息（参见 Yoon, Johnson, & Csibra 等人，2008；Okumura, Kobayashi, & Itakura，2016；但可参考 Silverstein, Gliga, Westermann, & Parise，2018）。在12个测试视频中，物体与一名成人一同展示（行动阶段）。我们操纵视频中的交流性语境，使得成人要么在望向婴儿的方向后观察物体（交流性语境），要么演员单独观察物体而未对婴儿进行任何指示（非交流性）。在每个视频结束后，场景被遮挡，随后揭示三种不同结果之一：婴儿在行动阶段刚刚看到的物体（无变化，基线）、婴儿刚刚看到的物体但位于新的位置（位置变化）或新的物体（身份变化）。通过操纵后续结果阶段的交流性语境和物体特征，我们旨在从概念上复制先前的研究发现，即观察到的交流性语境可能使婴儿倾向于编码支持关于物体种类（即物体身份）学习的外部特征，而非时空信息（即物体位置）。与先前研究此效应的方法不同，我们采用了一种研究设置和数据处理程序，使我们能够利用眼动追踪技术自动提取婴儿的注视反应，而不是手动编码婴儿的注视行为。