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The ability to reason about fairness plays a defining role in the development of morality. Thus, researchers have long been interested in understanding when and how a sensitivity to fairness first develops. Here, we examined infants' ability to use fairness information in selecting social partners. Using a novel experimental paradigm that combined pre-recorded stimuli with an active behavioral measure, we tested whether infants preferred to socially engage with an individual they had previously seen behave fairly or unfairly. After viewing an individual distribute goods to third parties either equally (i.e., 3:3 distribution) or unequally (i.e., 5:1 distribution), both 13- and 17-month-old infants selectively chose to engage in a social interaction with (i.e., take a toy from) an individual who distributed resources equally. The use of a novel paradigm to assess infants' fairness preferences demonstrates that infants' previously established fairness preferences extend across different, more demanding paradigms, and may therefore be more enduring in nature. Together, these findings provide new insights into the nature of infants' fairness representations, and fill in key gaps in the developmental timeline of infants' ability to use fairness information in their consideration of potential social partners. In sum, these findings build on previous research by demonstrating that infants not only hold an expectation that resources should be distributed fairly, they also preferentially interact with those who have previously done so. The early-emerging ability to both reason about and use fairness information may play an influential role in the development of complex prosocial behaviors related to morality more broadly.

The ability to decide whether, when and how to try is central to human learning. We investigated whether infants can make rational inferences about when and how to try on a novel problem-solving task. After learning from an adult that the task was either easy, difficult or impossible to solve, infants varied in whether, when and how they tried based on the type of social evidence that they received and on their own ongoing experience with the task. Specifically, infants formed expectations about the task, their own ability to solve the task and the experimenter’s ability to solve the task, in light of accumulating evidence across time that impacted their time spent trying, trying force, affect, and help-seeking behaviour on the task. Thus, infants flexibly integrate social input and first-hand experience in a dynamic fashion to engage in adaptive persistence. How do young learners decide when and how to try in challenging situations? Lucca et al. find that infants dynamically integrate first-hand experience with social information to selectively persist when their hard work is likely to pay off.

Early encounters with failure can serve as a double-edged sword for children, offering either valuable learning experiences or posing challenges to future achievement. However, a significant research gap remains regarding how parents coach their children to cope with failure. This study developed a novel survey to measure parents’ coaching strategies in response to children’s failure in math, reading, and extracurricular learning activities, and explored their associations with child mastery motivation and predictors. A sample of 145 primary caregivers (87% biological mothers) of children aged 4 to 7 (mean age = 6.02, and 45% boys) was recruited both locally and online in the US. Primary caregivers completed an online survey. Factor analysis was utilized to identify parents’ coaching strategies, and multiple regression analysis was adopted to examine the predictors and outcomes of these strategies. We identified three distinct coaching strategies: Emotion-Coaching Strategies, Persistence Strategies, and Permissive/Minimization Strategies. Emotion-Coaching and Persistence Strategies were positively correlated with children’s mastery motivation, including object-oriented persistence, mastery pleasure, and general competence. Conversely, Permissive/Minimization Strategies were linked to lower mastery pleasure and higher negative reactions to failure. Furthermore, parents' and children's personal traits predicted parents’ coaching strategies. Specifically, parents’ grit and children’s effortful control were related to Emotion-Coaching Strategies, while parents’ failure mindsets, grit, and perfectionism correlated with Persistence Strategies. Family income significantly predicted Permissive/Minimization Strategies. The findings highlight the complexities of parental coaching approaches and their implications for fostering resilience in children facing failure in their learning journeys.

Infants' pointing gestures are a critical predictor of early vocabulary size. However, it remains unknown precisely how pointing relates to word learning. The current study addressed this question in a sample of 108 infants, testing one mechanism by which infants' pointing may influence their learning. In Study 1,18-montholds, but not 12-month-olds, more readily mapped labels to objects if they had first pointed toward those objects than if they had referenced those objects via other communicative behaviors, such as reaching or gaze alternations. In Study 2, when an experimenter labeled a not pointed-to-object, 18-month-olds' pointing was no longer related to enhanced fast mapping. These findings suggest that infants' pointing gestures reflect a readiness and, potentially, a desire to learn.

Ivancovsky et al.'s Novelty-Seeking Model suggests several mechanisms that might underlie developmental change in creativity and curiosity. We discuss how these implications both do and do not align with extant developmental findings, suggest two further elements that can provide a more complete developmental account, and discuss current methodological barriers to formulating an integrated developmental model of curiosity and creativity.

The uniquely human ability to acquire language has led to two important and enduring questions: how did humans evolve the ability to communicate through language, and how do human infants acquire this ability so adeptly? Here, I aim to provide new insights into these long-standing questions by exploring how human infants and nonhuman primates use and develop nonverbal communicative behaviors. Chapter 1 introduces the significance of the empirical studies by outlining the role of nonverbal behaviors in shaping uniquely human communicative skills, along both evolutionary and developmental timelines. In Chapter 2, I take a developmental approach and investigate the role of one particularly important nonverbal behavior, infants’ pointing gestures, in facilitating early language development. I found that pointing has a direct and immediate impact on word learning: in the moment an infant points toward an object, they have a heightened readiness to learn that object’s label. In Chapter 3, I test how pointing relates to learning in a variety of domains, and explores potential motives driving infants’ production of pointing. Results demonstrated that pointing reflects a heightened readiness to learn both labels and functions, and are potentially motivated by requests for objects’ labels. In Chapter 4, I take an evolutionary approach and describe a study assessing another important form of nonverbal communication, gaze alternations, in bonobos and chimpanzees. Like humans, bonobos and chimpanzees gaze alternated more when interacting with an attentive, as opposed to inattentive, communicative partner. However, unlike humans, individuals produced few gaze alternations (bonobos) or only frequently gaze alternated after reaching adulthood (chimpanzees). Chapter 5 provides an overview and synthesis of the empirical findings, as well as important future directions. Together, the studies presented here confirm that nonverbal behaviors are a critical feature of the communication systems of both nonhuman apes and human infants. By demonstrating how human infants and nonhuman apes use nonverbal behaviors to communicate and learn, the current findings provide unique insights into the origins and development of language.