Our Research

At TECL, we are investigating the developmental origins of children’s thinking and behaviour in the domains of social, cognitive, and moral development. Our current work focuses on three main lines of research:

  1. How do infants and children develop an understanding of moral norms and how does this understanding influence our behaviour?

  2. How do infants and children learn from and integrate information gained from their own first-hand experience with information learned from observing others?

  3. How do infants and children respond to challenging situations? When and why do they decide to persist in their attempts, try new strategies, or simply give up?

Infants’ development of social knowledge is rich, rapidly acquired, and experience-dependent.

- Jessica Sommerville (Principal Investigator)

Our research on infants’ and children’s understanding of moral norms suggests that infants develop a basic understanding of fairness in the first two years of life, influenced by their own experience sharing objects. Other research on this topic has revealed limitations in infants’ moral behaviour: While infants help others to achieve their goals, their tendency to do so is heavily influenced by how much effort is required for them to help another person.

Our findings suggests that in some cases first-person experience may be a more powerful learning source than observational experience. Critically, infants and children appear to integrate information that they learn from watching others, with information gained from their own experience in flexible and adaptive ways.

We have found that experience and parental language (such as the praise that parents use in response to infants’ and children’s trying attempts) can positively impact trying behaviour. We have also learned that toddlers are strategic in their trying behaviour: they use information about their own abilities, the abilities of their social partners, and the nature of the task to decide when and how to try.

To address these questions, we have used a combination of behavioural approaches (attention to social events, infants’ choices of social partners, etc.) and non-invasive physiological approaches (e.g., EEG, ERP, pupil dilation) to answer these questions.