Social Relation by Preverbal Infants

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Social relation by preverbal infants 1. The main target of the study made by Hamlin et al. was to find the answers for questions about social development of humans - at what point we start to distinguish between good and bad, between friend and enemy and how we do that. Experimenters have discussed how infants of 6-months and 10-months of age can perceive good and bad by linking actions of individuals towards others by evaluating them as appealing or aversive. The study consisted of three experiments which were constructed to exclude the most probable of errors and provide the most precise data. Three characters were used in the experiment: ‘climber’- a circular shaped object which was trying to climb up the hill; ‘helper’-a triangular shaped object which helped ‘climber’ to get up the hill by pushing him upwards (helping trial); ‘hinderer’- a square shaped object which hindered ‘climber’ by pushing him downwards (hindering trial). The infants observed alternating, helping and hindering trials. Their looking time was measured on each trial, until it reached a pre-set criterion indicating that they had processed these events enough times. After an observation of all trials, infants made a choice between ‘helper’ and ‘hinderer’. Experimenters have found that infants choose ‘helper’ significantly more often. To exclude upwards and downwards movement as a factor of impact on results, they have conducted a second experiment where neutral up and down motions of the same shaped objects has been showed to the same infants. The result was no interaction between objects, so only direction of movement could be a factor of choice. Therefore infants have chosen both objects equally frequent and made no distinction. The third experiment was made to provide supporting data for the assumption that infants can distinguish not only between good and bad, but also between good
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