4-Month-Olds' Neural Responses to Helping and Hindering Interactions (the hill paradigm)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A recent study in our laboratory (Tan & Hamlin, 2022) combined methodologies from both Cowell & Decety (2015) and Gredeback and colleagues (2015) to explore the role of both alpha asymmetry and related ERP components of sociomoral evaluations through the hill paradigm on two different age groups of 6- (N= 42) and 12-month-olds (N= 32). Similarly to Cowell & Decety’s (2015) study in which 12- and 24-month-olds presented greater right frontal alpha power (indexing approach motivation) while watching helping versus hindering events, Tan & Hamlin study found that 6- (but, not 12-) month-olds showed greater activation in the left frontal area during hindering versus helping events. Moreover, in opposition to Gredebäck et al.’s (2015) study in which 6-month-olds showed larger P400 ERP amplitudes (indexing social perception) when viewing still images of helpers versus hinderers, infants at both 6- and 12-months exhibited significantly greater amplitudes in the P400 (and related N290) ERP components when viewing hinderers versus helpers. Altogether, past studies examining neural responses to helping versus hindering events and to helpers versus hinderers each suggest that the neural mechanisms involved in approach/avoidance and social processing, and not those involved in basic attention allocation, underlie infants’ differential responses to sociomoral events and agents. That said, the results are somewhat inconsistent across studies, and demand replication. Further, no study has examined infants younger than 6 months, whereas behavioural preferences for helpers have been demonstrated in the hill paradigm as early as 3 months (Hamlin et al., 2010). The current study aims to replicate Tan & Hamlin, 2022 in a sample of 4-month-olds. This age range was chosen as it is near to the youngest age at which behavioral preferences for helpers in the hill paradigm has been demonstrated, but is the earliest age for EEG studies employing visual stimuli, due to infants developing neck muscles to independently support their head upright at 4 months of age (Hadders-Algra, 2013). As in Tan & Hamlin (2022), EEG frontal asymmetry and ERP components P400, N290, and Nc will be measured. We hypothesize that we will replicate Tan & Hamlin’s (2022) findings with 4-month-olds; specifically, 4-month-olds will show greater right frontal alpha power (i.e., greater left frontal area activation) to helping versus hindering scenarios, greater P400 and N290 amplitudes to hinderers vs helpers and no differential Nc components between trials. To conclude, the results of this study would aid in the further understanding of when and how preverbal infants develop a rudimentary understanding of sociomoral reasoning and responding.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".