Infants’ use of movement synchrony to anticipate affiliation in others

abstractInfants socially engage with others and observe others’ social inter-actions from early in life. One characteristic found to be importantfor signaling and establishing affiliative social relationships isphysical coordination and synchronization of movements. Thisstudy investigated whether synchrony in others’ movements sig-nals affiliation to 12- and 15-month-old infants. The infants wereshown a scene in which two characters moved either syn-chronously or non-synchronously with a third character in the cen-ter. Next, the center character made an affiliation declaration andsubsequently approached and cuddled one of the two characters.Using measures of gaze, we gauged infants’ inferences about whomthe center character would affiliate with before the cuddling tookplace. We found that 15-month-olds, but not 12-month-olds,inferred that the center character would affiliate with the previ-ously synchronous character, suggesting that they can make infer-ences about others’ affiliation based on movement synchrony. Thefindings are discussed in terms of their relevance to the infants’personal preferences and the potential importance of first-personexperience in the development of social cognition.Ó2017 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an openaccess article under the CC BY-NC-ND licens