1. % looking to toy location
What you see is not always what you get: Showing effects of event structure
 Peter Gordon, Alisa Matlin, Nicholas Joy, Erin Aylward, Janet Eisenband
Teachers College, Columbia University
Introduction
The Case of SHOW
The GIVE/HUG Effect
Is there a distinction between seeing and knowing when employing looking paradigms in infant research?
For infants to understand an event, they must be looking at the relevant aspects of the event in question
This establishes gaze direction as a necessary component of event understanding
Recent studies have established that gaze direction predicts whether infants show increased looking when obscured objects do not re-emerge from a screen in the expected manner (Johnson, 2003)
But can event representation be dissociated from gaze direction?
In other words, is gaze direction a sufficient condition for event understanding?
When 8 to 10 month olds see an event of GIVING, they treat a toy undergoing transfer of possession with special status
When habituated to GIVING, they show recovery of looking time when the toy is missing in test video stimuli
This is because the object is RELEVANT to the action
Infants do not show recovery of looking time when the missing object is IRRELEVANT to the action, such as when two people are hugging and one is carrying a toy (Fig. 1)
Eye Tracking
Eye tracking of infants as they watched the GIVE event video revealed that, during the transfer of possession, they looked at the toy more than any other element in the scene
When the toy was missing in the test video, they continued to look at where the toy had been in the original video (Fig. 3)
With the HUG videos, infants looked at the toy much less during the interaction phase, and almost never when it was no longer in the video (Fig. 4)
Conclusion
Gaze direction to the toy during events predicted whether infants showed recovery of looking time in the habituation test
The act of GIVING requires an agent, a transferred object, and a recipient. In this sense, the toy is highly relevant to the action, whereas it is not relevant for HUG
In a similar manner, the act of SHOWING requires an agent, an object being shown, and an experiencer
Again, the object is highly relevant in defining the act of SHOWING
As in the case of GIVE, eye tracking revealed that infants looked at the toy when watching a video of SHOWING (Fig. 5)
However, infants did not show recovery of looking time when the toy was removed on test trials (Fig. 2)
Why Not?
A valid representation of SHOW requires Theory of Mind understanding that one person intends to transfer information to the other through a visual medium
Infants under 12 months are unlikely to understand this relationship
Low level cues attract infants’ attention to the action around the toy, but this is insufficient to trigger dishabituation to the change in the event. Seeing and understanding are dissociated in this case
They see it but they just don’t get it
Approach
HUG w/
Retreat
GIVE w/
GIVE w/o
HUG w/o
Habituation
Test
Event Videos
Eye Tracking Data
% looking to toy location
Habituation Data
SHOW w/
SHOW w/o