Switching Sides. Children use of Ostensive Cues.

CALERO CECILIA I; MARIANO SEMELMAN; ARIEL ZILBERBERG; MARIANO SIGMAN

Huerta Grande, Córdoba

Congreso; XXVII Congreso Anual de la Sociedad Argentina de Investigación en Neurociencias; 2012

Sociedad Argentina de Investigación en Neurociencias (san)

Previous studies have demonstrated that infants can recognize an adult´s communicative intention by being sensitive to the ostensive cues (OC) used to indicate a learning context (Csibra, 2010). In contrast, infants´ ability to teach has been much less studied than their ability to learn (Strauss, 2004; Davis-Unger 2008; Battro, 2010) and therefore, we do not yet know if infants produce these OC when they want to manifest an informative intention. In the present minipaper we studied if children made use of OC - including changes in body orientation, eye-contact, eyebrow-raising and in the voice pitch - in a scenario in which they become teachers. We examined kids? use of OC in games in which a rule had to be inferred before being taught to an adult. And found, as previously reported, that children, as young as three year old, were capable of using screening-off information to learn the causal structure of biological events (Schulz, 2004). Here we show, for the first time, that children can not only detect, recognize and react to OC (Csibra, 2009) but furthermore, that they are capable of generating these signals when teaching. Our results strongly suggest that they can actively transmit knowledge to others, using well-known ostensive cues to denote a pedagogical intention.