Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Despite the centrality of caregiving relationships in the lives of infants, little is known about whether and how infants represent these relationships characterized by strong attachment and asymmetry in obligation and skills. The current studies (N=95) investigate whether 8-to-10-month-old infants attend to two cues—affiliative touch and physical size—to predict who will respond to distress. In Study 1 (n=49), infants expected larger characters to respond to the emotional needs of smaller characters, only when they saw affiliative touch (proportion looking time at large character: BF10=6.72). In Study 2 (n=46), they did not expect smaller characters to respond to larger characters (proportion looking time: BF10=0.17), suggesting they expect asymmetrical roles in caregiving relationships. Collectively, these findings suggest that humans have an early-emerging ability to recognize key relationships in their social world.