Socio-emotional Experiences and Primate Social Cognition

Investigations into how early socio-ecological experiences influence the development of social cognition

Infants have a variety of social experiences, within a variety of caregiving styles, and can live in a variety of settings. This project investigates how early social cognition, for example, gestural communication and triadic engagements, can vary in form and function across socio-eco-cultural settings.

There are a variety of forms of joint attention found in infants living across diverse human socio-ecological settings. The form favoured in western, middle-class settings differs from the form favoured in a foraging community, and both differ from the form found in a subsistence farming community. All appear to function similarly, however, to engage infants with activities important to each community. We did not find a single, human-unique form of joint attention. The joint attention forms of chimpanzee infants also were influenced by the socio-ecological setting in which they lived.
Similarly, infants produce and receive communicative gestures. Many types of gestures were found across human settings, overlapping with many types of gestures found in chimpanzee infants. In early infancy, we did not find any gestures were human-unique.