Evidence for Referential Understanding in the Emotions Domain at Twelve and Eighteen Months
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Infants as young as 12 months readily modulate their behavior toward novel, ambiguous objects based on emotional responses that others display. Such social-referencing skill offers powerful benefits to infants' knowledge acquisition, but the magnitude of these benefits depends on whether they appreciate the referential quality of others' emotional messages, and are skilled at using cues to reference (e.g., gaze direction, body posture) to guide their interpretation of such messages. Two studies demonstrated referential understanding in 12- and 18-month-olds' responses to another's emotional outburst. Infants relied on the presence versus absence of referential cues to determine whether an emotional message should be linked with a salient, novel object in the first study (N = 48), and they actively consulted referential cues to disambiguate the intended target of an affective display in the second study (N = 32). These findings provide the first experimental evidence of such sophisticated referential abilities in 12-month-olds, as well as the first evidence that infant social referencing at any age actually trades on referential understanding.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it