Geänderte Inhalte

Zukunftstag 2025 in der Historischen Sternwarte Göttingen – Ein Einblick in die Psychologische Forschung

Am diesjährigen Zukunftstag durften wir in der Historischen Sternwarte Göttingen sechs neugierige Nachwuchsforschende begrüßen – drei Mädchen und drei Jungen –, die einen interaktiven Einblick in die Welt der Psychologie erhalten haben.

Previous research has suggested that infants and toddlers prioritize the imitation of goals over movements, but recent evidence revealed a more flexible pattern of imitation that depended on the visual saliency or efficiency of movements and goals. This study investigated how visual saliency of action goals alongside verbal information influences toddlers’ action processing and imitation. Twenty- to 22-month-old toddlers observed a toy animal being moved in a particular style toward one of two goals. Goals were either two-dimensional drawings or three-dimensional objects. Before the demonstration, the experimenter provided verbal information about the movement style for one group of toddlers, and about the goal for the other group. Toddlers’ imitation was influenced by goal saliency, verbal information, and an interplay of these factors. Toddlers preferred to imitate the goal over the movement in the 3D condition, and the movement over the goal in the 2D condition, revealing that goal saliency influenced imitation preferences. The effect of verbal cues depended on the order of saliency conditions. Verbal cues impacted imitation only in toddlers who participated in the 2D trials first, indicating that toddlers might be especially susceptible to verbal cues when initial visual information is less salient.

The acquisition of mental language understanding is crucial for the social-cognitive development, especially for the development of Theory of Mind reasoning. While there is evidence for the production of epistemic terms in the third year of life, the comprehension of different degrees of speaker (un-)certainty has not yet been systematically investigated at this age. In the present study, we developed an eyetracking task and measured preferential looking as an indicator of an implicit understanding of the epistemic verbs ‘know’ and ‘think’ in children aged 27 (N = 199) and 36 months (N = 131). Toddlers were faced with two agents who indicated the location of a hidden object (right vs. left box), with a narrator attributing contrasting degrees of certainty to their statements (‘know’ vs. ‘think’) before asking the toddlers about the object’s location. We measured the extent to which children fixated the box associated with the agent described as knowing where the target was and found both at 27 and 36 months of age systematic differences in their looking behaviour to this box across the trial. Children appeared to display a spontaneous preference for the box associated with the agent who knew the target’s location, relative to the agent who only thought the target was in their box in the pre-questioning phase. Subsequently, their preference switched in the post-questioning phase; however, this effect was smaller. These results indicate that toddlers in their third year of life distinguish different degrees of speaker (un-)certainty, expressed by the verbs ‘know’ and 'think'.