Monacò, S. 1 , Quadrelli, E. . 1, 2 , Brenna, V. . 1 , Turati, C. 1, 2 & Bulf, H. 1, 2
1 Department of Psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca, Piazza Ateneo Nuovo 1, 20126 Milano, Italy
2 NeuroMi, Milan Center for Neuroscience, Milano, Italy
Recent studies have shown that infants are able to use statistical information (i.e., statistical learning) to segment a continuous stream of actions. Furthermore, it has been shown that infants can rely on social cues to understand others? actions. The aim of the present research was to investigate whether 12-month-old infants were able to learn statistical regularities from a sequence of gestures and whether this ability was affected by social vs non-social interaction. Using a visual familiarization task, infants were presented with video sequences in which one actress imitated a second actress performing unconventional gestures. In the social condition, the two actresses were sitting facing each other, while in the non-social condition they were sitting with their backs turned. During the familiarization phase four fixed pairs of videos were presented in a random order, so that the transitional probabilities were 1.0 within each pair (units) and 0.33 between pairs (part-units). In the test phase, infants were presented with sequences constituted by units and part-units in alternation. Results show that 12-month-old infants are able to extract the statistical information embedded in the sequences of gestures only within the social condition, suggesting that social interaction enhances infants? ability to learn statistical regularities.