This study offers a new method for examining the bodily, manual, and eye movements of a chimpanzee at the micro-level. A female chimpanzee wore a lightweight head-mounted eye tracker (60 Hz) on her head while engaging in daily interactions with the human experimenter. The eye tracker recorded her eye movements accurately while the chimpanzee freely moved her head, hands, and body. Three video c...

Autism is characterised by difficulties in social functioning, notably in interactions with other people. Yet, most studies addressing social difficulties have used static images or, at best, videos of social stimuli, with no scope for real interaction. Here, we study one crucial aspect of social interactions-gaze behaviour-in an interactive setting. First, typical individuals were shown videos...

The joint effect of (a) level of satiation with social stimuli (relative satiation) and (b) attitude of the child toward the reinforcing agent (valence) on social reinforcer effectiveness was investigated. The experiment was conducted in two parts. In Session 1, the valence manipulation, which consisted in showing subjects a film that depicted Experimenter 1 as nice or mean, was performed by Ex...

Changes between the learning and testing contexts affect learning, memory, and generalization. We examined whether a change (between learning and testing) in the person children were interacting with affects generalization. Three-, four-, and five-year-old children were trained on eight novel noun categories by one experimenter. Children were tested for their ability to generalize the label to ...

Two groups of children, a pragmatically impaired (PI) group and a group of language-normal (LN) age-matched peers, were compared by use of a referential communication task. Experimenter and child both played the roles of listener and instructor during the task and, in addition, the experimenter sometimes failed to give adequate information when in the role of instructor. Lexical content and str...

Do 5-month-old infants show differences in processing objects as a function of a prior interaction with an adult? Using a live ERP paradigm we assessed this question utilizing a within-subjects design. Infants saw objects during two pretest phases with an adult experimenter. We recorded event-related potentials to the presentation of objects following the interactive pretest phases. Experimenta...

In the present research, we investigate the communicative strategies of 20 month old human infants and great apes when requesting rewards from a human experimenter. Infants and apes both adapted their signals to the attentional state of the experimenter as well as to the location of the reward. Yet, while infants frequently positioned themselves in front of the experimenter and pointed towards ...

This study looked at whether toddlers posit the existence of unobserved causes when events occur probabilistically. Older (18-24 months) and younger (12-17 months) children were introduced to novel events. An experimenter pressed a red handle and a lollipop emerged from a box; she then pressed a green handle and a cake emerged. These events were repeated three times. On the fourth trial, the ex...