Chapter 35: Infant Communication and Social Cognition

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Okay, let's unpack this.

Welcome to the deep dive.

Today we are undertaking a really fascinating mission, one that looks right at the building blocks of human culture and connection.

We are, we're diving into a really comprehensive academic review on, well, on how human communication and social cognition emerge and how they're intertwined right from infancy.

And we're gonna focus almost entirely on one single but incredibly profound gesture, pre -linguistic pointing.

The core question is this, how does a human baby, well before they can put together a sentence, how do they learn to communicate their intentions, share what they know and even grasp what's going on in the mind of the person right next to them?

We're really looking at the roots of what makes us uniquely human.

That's it.

And the mission for you, our listener, is to really get to grips with the central dilemma that drives this entire field of research.

It's a classic chicken and egg problem for developmental scientists.

It really is what comes first.

Exactly.

Do infants need some kind of pre -existing social cognitive frame, a precursor to what we call theory of mind, that enables them to engage in meaningful social interaction?

Or is it the other way around?

Is the social activity itself, the very act of trying to point and respond, is that the engine that actually drives the cognitive development?

That dilemma is so critical because for decades, the research was just fragmented.

Completely.

And you had these alternative views, especially coming out of the rise of language acquisition research,

that suggested the real deep understanding of others' minds that only truly appears later.

Maybe when kids get verbal language.

Right.

And in that view, social activity is the primary motor.

The deep cognitive basis just kind of follows along later.

But the chapter we're diving into today argues that this might be, well, too simplistic.

It seems logical that for any organism to successfully engage in social interaction, to even know how to begin, there has to be some foundational cognitive basis there from the start.

It has to be an interplay.

It's an interplay, right?

Interactional experiences, of course, they shape understanding, but that basic capacity to engage has to be there.

Precisely.

The evidence we're gonna talk about converges on this idea that these two things, social action and social cognition,

are deeply, deeply intertwined from very early on.

But as you mentioned, historically the researchers looking at this were in two different camps.

Two distinct strands of research that developed in almost total isolation.

They often missed each other completely.

So let's define those two historical silos because I think understanding them helps us appreciate the breakthrough that this chapter really represents.

The first was what we can call the cognitive side.

Okay.

The research here was all about precursors to a theory of mind, or Tom.

These studies were highly experimental and they often used non -interactional methods.

Like what does that mean, non -interactional?

So things like visual looking paradigms.

Researchers would track where an infant looked and for how long, to try and reveal an early sensitivity to what other people's goals are, or their intentions, or even just their direction of attention.

So they're watching a little movie, basically.

They're watching a movie.

And the core finding was that, yes, infants could process these social cues very early on, but here's the crucial gap.

What was it?

These cognitive abilities were almost never connected to the infant's actual interactional skills.

Their ability to take that knowledge and use it to communicate in the real world.

Ah, okay.

So we knew an infant could watch an adult, say, pick up a toy and understand that the goal was to get the toy.

Right.

But we didn't know if they could then use that understanding to, you know, successfully ask the adult for the toy themselves.

Exactly.

And then the other silo was the social side.

Okay.

This research focused squarely on pre -linguistic communication itself.

So they were analyzing, pointing these little proto -conversations infants have, and tracking how that connected to later language skills.

So they were looking at the communication act itself.

They were.

And the initial observations suggested that infants were deploying these early communication strategies that really did seem to carry the seeds of mature human dialogue, you know, independent of language.

But here, the crucial gap was the exact opposite.

They didn't know the cognitive part.

They didn't clarify the cognitive underpinnings.

So they recorded the what, but not what understanding of the recipient's mind was actually required to make that communication meaningful.

So this deep dive then is tasked with bridging that exact gap.

Yes.

We're looking at how infants communicate before language, what specific social cognitive abilities are involved when they do that, and how early their social interactions start to shape those very skills.

And our central focus is that moment a 12 -month -old sticks out their index finger.

That simple gesture holds it all.

So let's start right there with that core behavior, pointing.

It's such an ordinary gesture, we take it completely for granted.

But it's arguably the most potent pre -linguistic behavior in the entire human repertoire.

Infants typically start pointing around 12 months of age just before that explosive growth of language begins.

And that timing is what makes it such an essential window.

It lets us look into the cognitive and social roots of human communication before language comes in and complicates the picture.

And the reason developmental researchers got so obsessed with pointing is because it has this deep connection to, of all things, the philosophy of language.

It does.

The whole investigation is heavily motivated by these pragmatic theories of communication from thinkers like Grice and Searle.

And what do they argue?

For adult communication, they basically said that any meaningful utterance has to involve three key components.

There's an underlying intention, there's a specific content reference, and there's a social reason for communicating what they call elocutionary forces.

Okay, so if I ask you to pass the salt, my intention is to communicate the content is the salt and the force is a request.

Perfect example.

So the big skeptical question researchers had to answer was,

does infant pointing,

the simple finger extension, really carry all three of those sophisticated layers of intention, just like an adult sentence?

Or is it just a random self -centered movement that we, the adults, are just reading meaning into?

And the field moved really fast from simple observation like is pointing just a way to get things to these highly controlled experimental investigations.

And what was the conclusion?

The conclusion this chapter arrives at is that when 12 -month -olds point, they're demonstrating what they call a unitary competence.

It's built on three interwoven layers of intention, and they're all present simultaneously right around that first birthday.

Three layers.

Okay, let's break those down slowly, starting with the foundation.

Layer one is the communicative intention, or CI.

This is just the fundamental intention to address a person and actively expect a response from them.

Okay, so I am talking to you.

I am talking to you, and I expect you to do something.

Then layer two is the referential intention, or RI.

This is the intention to direct the recipient's attention away from the infant and toward a specific thing or aspect in the world.

So I'm talking to you about that.

Exactly.

And layer three is the social intention, or SI.

This is the motive, the illicutionary force.

The underlying reason for pointing is it to request help, to share interest, or maybe even to provide some unsolicited information.

Wow, that immediately refutes the skeptical view that pointing is just some egocentric action.

It has to.

If you have to address a specific person about a specific thing for a specific reason, you are engaging in a pretty complex, multi -layered social act.

What's fascinating here is that infants aren't just reacting.

They are performing sophisticated social acts that carry the fundamental organizational structure of mature human dialogue.

Okay, so let's dig into that first layer.

Communicative intentions, or CI.

Right, so let's start with CI.

Since we can't just ask a 12 -month -old what they intended, we have to operationalize it.

How do you do that?

Functionally.

We define it as a behavior that's performed flexibly and intentionally for someone else to get a reaction, but without using physical force.

You can't just grab their hand.

And the evidence for this in infants' own pointing actions is pretty compelling, right?

Because they demonstrate this highly tailored social behavior.

It's very tailored.

They show a really clear sensitivity to the recipient's condition.

For instance, studies show that infants point significantly less when their partner physically cannot see the gesture.

Like if the adult's back is turned or their eyes are closed.

Exactly.

Which shows they understand that communication requires a capable, available recipient.

But what's even more telling is their response when it succeeds or fails.

What happens then?

If the partner sees the point but doesn't react, maybe they just look at the infant instead of the object, the infants will persist.

They don't give up.

They don't give up.

They'll repeat or augment their point, sometimes adding more insistent vocalizations.

They are actively pursuing a communicative response.

So if the adult misses the memo, the baby basically corrects the signal, which demonstrates they have an expectation that this communication system is supposed to work.

That's it.

And this leads us to a long -standing debate that challenged this whole idea of CI early on, the gaze alternation debate.

Oh, I've heard of this.

The critics claimed infants were only pointing for themselves because they often didn't immediately look back and forth between the object and the adult's face.

Right, according to some theories that gaze alternation was required to prove they were communicating to the adult.

That seems like a very, very rigid criterion.

Why would researchers insist on that as the only measure of intent?

Well, the chapter argues that gaze alternation is not the only, and probably not even the best, criterion for communicative intent.

Why not?

I mean, think about the dynamics of the situation.

First, the thing they're pointing at, the brightly colored object or the exciting bird, it might just capture the infant's attention more than the social response they're expecting.

Okay, that makes sense.

But second, and more importantly,

infants might reserve looking back at the recipient only for when the recipient feels to respond as expected.

Oh, so it's a repair mechanism.

It becomes a moment of repair, a systemic check.

Hey, did you get that?

I see.

So if the communication works on the first try, there's no real need to check the adult's face.

The gaze check is only necessary for social repair.

And furthermore, in these really naturalistic settings, especially what's called a primordial sharing situation, where infants are often held close or sitting on a caregiver's lap.

A shared visual perspective already exists.

It's already there.

The ground of shared attention is established, which makes that repeated explicit three -way gaze alternation often totally unnecessary.

This moves us into deeper, more philosophical territory, doesn't it?

Distinguishing between the Gratian informative intention and the communicative intention.

Can you break down that subtle but really important difference again for our listeners?

Certainly.

The informative intention is just the basic goal.

I intend to change the cognitive environment of the recipient.

So if I subtly push my empty glass to the edge of the table,

intending for the waiter to see it and refill it, that's my informative intention.

I want the waiter to know the glass is empty.

And what makes the communicative intention, the CI, higher order?

The communicative intention is the meta intent.

It's the intention that the recipient understands that this was my intention.

Ah.

So in the glass example, if I push the glass and I look directly at the waiter with a knowing look, I'm making it explicit that I intend for him to see my intention.

I'm emphasizing my authorship.

Right, you could technically get the refill, achieve the informative intention without making your authorship explicit at all.

You could.

That higher order intent making your authorship clear, that sounds incredibly sophisticated for a one -year -old.

Are they hiding intent or just making it overt?

They are definitely making it overt.

That's the crucial point.

Hiding authorship is probably beyond them, but emphasizing it is central.

And the evidence strongly suggests that 12 -month -olds emphasize their authorship through the very form of their gesture.

Well, the canonical index finger point has no other instrumental function.

You can't grab anything with it.

Its only function is communication.

It's non -instrumental.

And it's accompanied by these specific prosodic vocalizations that are only used in communication.

It overtly manifests the communicative intention.

And we have even more compelling evidence showing that older infants really value their communicative intent being understood separate from the goal just being achieved.

Yes, there are these beautiful studies with children as young as 18 months that illustrate this perfectly.

Researchers set up scenarios where the child needed an object that's the informative intention.

They found that even if the informative intention was achieved, meaning the child got the object they wanted, they still augmented or repaired their communication if the communicative intention was misunderstood.

Wait, really?

So they got the toy, but they were still unhappy.

They were unhappy because the adult didn't seem to understand that they had asked for it.

They wanted the adult to acknowledge that they had successfully communicated their request, not just that the object happened to appear.

This confirms that CI is a robust and central goal of early pointing.

Okay, let's move to the second layer then, the referential intention, or RI.

If CI is the decision to communicate, RI is deciding what to communicate about.

That's right.

It's the intention to relate the addressee to some specific aspect of the world.

RI is what moves pointing beyond just a signal for attention.

And there were skeptical views about this too, right?

Oh yes.

Earlier views, like those proposed by Moore and D 'Entremont, suggested that pointing was purely for getting attention for the self.

They pointed out that 12 -month -olds often pointed just as much whether the adult was already looking at the object or not.

And their conclusion was that the infants weren't really trying to direct attention.

But that doesn't fully capture the nuance of a shared experience, does it?

I mean, if I see you looking at a beautiful painting, I might still point at it to share my own attitude or expand the topic, even though you've already noticed it.

Exactly.

And the key evidence against that attention to self view comes from something called referential repair.

This is a powerful demonstration of RI.

How does it work?

Researchers observe what happens when an infant points and the recipient misunderstands and looks at the wrong object.

What do the infants do?

They immediately repeat and refine their pointing.

They'll often use different trajectories, they'll get more insistent, until the adult looks at the specific desired referent.

They are clearly communicating a very specific referential relation, showing they want to align attention on that specific content.

The specificity and the persistence in correcting the error are key there.

It shows they aren't just saying look, but look there at that thing.

And that specificity goes far beyond what is just immediately visible.

The evidence for a production shows that infants point to non -perceptible or even absent entities.

What do you mean by that?

They'll point to occluded sites or to empty habitual locations of objects that are currently absent.

So if a toy is usually kept in a certain box and that box is now empty, a 12 -month -old can point to the empty box to request the toy.

Wow, so they're communicating about something that's beyond the here and now.

Completely.

They are using the point as a stand -in for an item that isn't physically present.

That requires a pretty advanced level of symbolic displacement, even before they have words.

It absolutely does.

And we see similar sophistication in their comprehension of points, right?

We do.

When we test comprehension, we're asking,

do they follow the point just as a directional cue or do they infer the intended referent?

So in a hiding game.

In a hiding game, if an adult points to a piece of fabric that's hiding a toy, infants don't just look at the fabric.

They comprehend the point to mean the toy is under the cloth, and they immediately go and retrieve it.

They're inferring the intended result of the point, the hidden location, not just the directional vector.

And they can infer absent reference even more abstractly.

There's a remarkable study where 18 -month -olds watched an adult point to an empty location where an object used to be.

Okay, so there's nothing there to see.

Nothing to see.

But that act of pointing primed their attention to that specific absent object when it was introduced later in a totally different, unrelated scene.

This shows the point wasn't a reaction to a stimulus, but an inference about an intended referent that was being held in the communicator's mind.

And that's a clear example of what's called embedded cognition, right?

The meaning of the gesture isn't in the action itself, but it's inferred based on shared history, context, and the communicator's intent about the world.

You've got it.

That's the core idea.

Okay, now we get to the third, and maybe the most interesting layer, the social intention, the why of the act, the illicutionary force.

We've all heard of Bate's famous distinction between imperative pointing and declarative pointing.

Imperative is using the adult as a tool to get an object, and declarative is using the object as a tool to get the adult's attention or comment.

Right.

But that distinction led to a significant challenge, didn't it, about the primitive nature of imperative pointing?

It did.

Imperative pointing was often viewed as very instrumental.

A child wants a cookie on a high shelf, they can't reach it, so they point.

It was seen as just a failed action attempt, not a cooperative social request.

So the deflationary view was that the point is just a signal that arises from a physical limitation rather than a genuine social request.

And we needed to challenge that assumption directly.

So in one critical study, infants were placed in a situation where they were playing with a specific toy, and they needed more pieces to keep the game going.

And the pieces were out of reach.

No, crucially, the objects were freely accessible.

There were no physical constraints.

The 12 -month -olds could have simply crawled over and gotten the objects themselves.

But they didn't.

A large number of them chose to stay in place and point to request the objects from the experimenter.

Wait, so they chose the communicative strategy over the instrumental one, even when the instrumental path was wide open to them.

Exactly.

That finding is so powerful.

It refrains imperative pointing completely.

It suggests that even the simplest request, pointing to get an object, is better understood not as some primitive egocentric signal, but as a cooperative communicative request for help.

That changes everything.

It means the infant is relying on a shared social structure from the very beginning.

They assume the partner is trustworthy and willing to help.

They do.

So now let's turn to declarative pointing, which is often described as just sharing interest.

What specific motives are actually underlying this?

We've identified two key motives beyond simple requests.

The first is what we call expressive pointing, where the real goal is to share and align referential attitudes.

How do you test for that?

Well, researchers tested it by having an adult express different reactions to the object the infant was pointing at.

So what happened when the adult seemed uninterested?

In one experiment, when an adult looked at the referent but then expressed a very clear lack of interest in it, the infants stopped pointing to that object for her in the next trials.

But they kept pointing if she just hadn't seen it.

Crucially, yes.

They persisted if she had just failed to see the event at all.

This shows they're not just looking for a rewarding emotional reaction from the adult.

They are checking if the partner is interested in the referent itself.

They want shared interest, not just shared attention.

That's a highly social motive.

But perhaps the most sophisticated motive you mentioned was informative pointing, volunteering information, helping others find something they need,

often unsolicited.

This moves us squarely into the realm of altruism and tracking the knowledge state of other people.

We had to design studies to isolate this.

So imagine an experimenter is cleaning a table and an item she needs falls down without her noticing.

The infants readily point out its new location.

The item itself is totally neutral.

There's no reward or joy in it for the infant.

But the real test comes when we change the adult's knowledge state.

What happens then?

The pointing drops off significantly when the experimenter had actually seen the object fall down and already knew its location.

So they are tailoring their communication based on the partner's internal ignorance.

If the adult already knows, the infant doesn't bother pointing.

If the adult is ignorant and searching, the infant will inform them.

And they even demonstrate a truly proactive form of informing.

They point to warn others.

Researchers had an adult react negatively to accidentally touching something aversive, say, a sticky patch in her reaching path.

Ooh, okay.

Later, when the adult was about to act again and the material was secretly put back without her knowledge, the infant spontaneously pointed it out to her, warning her to avoid it.

They volunteered this information.

Even though she wasn't searching or asking for help, they were preventing a negative outcome for her.

That evidence is just remarkable.

It completely refutes the idea that infants are only pointing to get positive attention or some kind of personal reward.

It strongly undermines what we call one mode of views, like the natural pedagogy framework.

That framework posits that pointing is primarily an evolutionary tool to request opaque cultural knowledge, like a name for something or its function.

But your findings show it's much broader than that.

Our findings show infants deploy this one single gesture flexibly for all these diverse interwoven social reasons,

expressive, requestive, informative.

The function of pointing is fundamentally relational.

It's for enabling social contact, building familiarity and trust, and learning about other people's relations to objects, all of which are necessary for human cooperation and culture.

Here's where it gets really interesting, because if infants are using pointing in these flexible, cooperative, and frankly sophisticated ways, they must have some kind of functional mind reading capacity.

They aren't performing adult verbal reasoning, but they clearly possess a practical working understanding of how others relate to the world.

That's the link we need to establish.

This section is all about exploring how infants' practical social information processing is directly connected to their ability to act appropriately and meaningfully in the social world.

We're moving beyond simple visual processing to look at how they track non -perceptual states.

We should probably define some terminology here, though, because we are moving into the realm of mental states.

We talk about epistemic states and conative states.

Can you just ground those in simple terms for the listener?

Of course.

When we talk about epistemic states, we're simply talking about what someone knows or doesn't know.

Their state of knowledge or ignorance.

Okay.

If I put my car keys in my pocket, your epistemic state is that you know the keys are in my pocket.

If I hide them behind my back without you seeing, your epistemic state is now one of ignorance about where they are.

Okay.

Knowledge and ignorance and conative states.

Conative states refer to desires, wants, intentions, or goals.

So if you're visibly looking for your wallet, your conative state is the desire to possess that wallet.

And infant communication demonstrates a practical knowledge of how these two states, what you know and what you want, drive your actions.

Exactly.

When infants point, they don't just register that an adult is looking at them.

They understand that the adult's attention is a condition for a successful reaction.

They adjust their pointing, not just based on where the adult is looking right now, but on where they expect the adult's gaze to move away from them and toward the referent.

And if that doesn't happen, they redirect them.

They redirect them, showing they have an expectation about the causal chain of social interaction.

And as we just discussed with informative pointing, they are actively tracking the adult's epistemic states.

Precisely.

We saw how they track ignorance.

They only inform an adult about a dropped object if the adult hadn't seen it fall.

But this tracking goes deeper.

They track information continuously, even when the adult isn't immediately searching.

Oh, so?

If an adult leaves the room and a desired toy is relocated, when the adult returns, the infant will spontaneously point out its new location, but only if the adult had not witnessed that change.

It shows they're maintaining a continuous model of the adult's knowledge state over time.

This suggests they're tracking specific mental contents that may not even match reality, which brings us to the tracking of false beliefs.

This is the classic measure of a developed theory of mind in older children.

Can 18 -month -olds really demonstrate this practically through communication?

They absolutely can in communication tasks.

Recall that warning study where an adult had reacted negatively to an aversive materia.

The sticky patch.

The sticky patch.

So we set up two boxes.

The adult thinks her toy is in one of them, even though the toy is now absent.

And the aversive material is actually in the box the adult believes contains the toy.

Okay, so the adult has a false belief.

She does.

And the 18 -month -olds selectively warn the adult about the material in the box that the adult falsely believed contained the toy.

That is profound.

They're acting based on the adult's internal mistaken belief about the world, not on the actual reality since the toy was gone.

It confirms their communication is tailored to the partner's specific, non -perceptually available mental contents.

And what's more, they link these epistemic states with kinative states.

They don't just inform about a change in reality.

They consider whether that change is relevant to the adult's previous intention.

Can you give us an example of how they link what you know with what you want?

Yeah, so when a toy is relocated, infants will inform the adult, but selectively.

They do it if the adult was previously searching for it.

If the adult had found the toy by accident or wasn't looking for it in the first place, the infant is much less likely to inform them of its new location.

So it's not just anticipating the endpoint of an action, which even eight -month -olds can do visually.

No, it's a step beyond.

This is an understanding of the recipient's goal, their kinative state, based on a history of behaviors and interactions, and then deciding if this new information is relevant to achieving that goal.

So their pointing isn't following simple rules.

It is an act of deep social understanding, adjusted moment by moment based on a real -time model of their partner's mind.

That's it.

They flexibly adjust their communication based on these complex, interlinked, non -perceptually available mental states.

This is practical social cognition in action.

And the same complexity we found in production must also hold true for comprehension.

When an infant sees someone else pointing, they have to recover both the specific content and the reason for it.

They do.

They're not treating pointing as a mere directional cue, but as an act that is about something for a reason.

We saw this in the hiding game.

They don't just look at the cloth.

They retrieve the toy from under it.

They comprehend the communicative intention extends beyond the physical gesture.

And just as they produce communication tailored to false beliefs, do they comprehend points that come from a speaker's false belief?

This is a truly spectacular finding.

It really shows the embedded nature of their social cognition.

In one key comprehension study, 17 -month -olds watched an object swap take place without the adult noticing.

So the adult now has a false belief about where the object is.

She does.

The adult then points to the wrong box based on her false belief.

And the infants, understanding that the adult's belief was mismatched with reality, successfully retrieve the object from the correct box to fulfill her underlying goal.

Wait, let me get this straight.

They ignored the immediate physical cue, the pointed location, and they filtered it through their understanding of the speaker's mistaken mental state to achieve the correct result.

That is the very definition of a practical theory of mind being deployed.

It's a massive achievement in social inference.

Incredible.

And similarly, they can use pointing to infer absent reference.

When 18 -month -olds watched an adult point to an empty location where an object used to be, that act of pointing primed their attention to that specific absent object when it appeared in a brand new scene later on.

They inferred the intended content even when it wasn't physically available.

So beyond the content, how do they figure out the specific social intention, the why of the point?

How do they disambiguate a request from, say, an expression of interest?

They're brilliant contextual detectives.

They're capable of integrating multiple cues.

First, they use spatial information and physical constraints.

How does that work?

Researchers found that 12 -month -olds offered an object more often when the adult pointed to it if the object was far away from the adult.

They seemed to reason.

If the object was close and easily reachable, the point must have meant something else, like sharing interest, not a request for help.

So if the adult could reach it, the point must be expressive.

If the adult couldn't reach it, the point must be requestive.

They're using the laws of physics to generate a mental inference about desire.

They are.

Second, they use the context of shared activity.

Intents understood a point directed toward a leftover toy as a directive to clean it up, only if the point came from the experimenter with whom they had previously shared the cleaning activity.

So the meaning of the point was embedded or maybe enacted in their shared social history, not just the present moment.

Perfectly put.

And finally, when context is limited, they rely on the subtle cues that accompany the point, the prosody and the gesture shape.

Right.

Parents naturally use different tones and hand shapes.

Yes.

Expressive pointing often has a wide pitch range.

Informative pointing uses a narrower range.

And imperative requests are sometimes made with a palm -up open hand, not the index finger.

And studies show that even when researchers intentionally removed all the complex context, 12 -month -olds still made appropriate inferences based on these accompanying characteristics alone.

They successfully inferred requestive, expressive, or informative intentions just from the tone and the hand shape?

They did.

The conclusion here seems really robust then.

Infants possess this practical knowledge of how interaction works.

They may not have adult language or abstract reasoning, but they have a functional theory of action, allowing them to flexibly predict and influence others'

behaviors based on tracking these connected co -native and epistemic states.

While we have established that infant communication is incredibly sophisticated, the chapter provides some important balance by noting that it's still fundamentally different from adult communication.

Of course.

The main difference lies in the constraint imposed by the lack of, well, symbolically structured language.

That constraint is the representational barrier.

We need to distinguish clearly between the kind of communication we've been discussing and the kind that comes later.

We do.

The pointy we've been analyzing is deictic.

It refers to the immediate environment, the here and now.

The next big evolutionary step, what some call the second dawn of communication, is representational communication.

And that's using a sign iconic or symbolic.

That stands for a referent that might be absent or abstract.

Exactly.

So an example of a deictic gesture is pointing at a dog that's right there.

An iconic representational gesture would be flapping your arms to indicate a bird, even if no bird is present.

Right, and iconic gestures, these creatively produced gestures that resemble the referent or its action, are a clear indicator that the communicator intends to invoke an external representation of the concept.

They are, and the research shows a really striking developmental lag here, which suggests the cognitive demands of creating a representation are much higher than inferring intent about objects that already exist.

Significant barrier then.

A very significant barrier.

Creative representational communication through gestures is rare, if not entirely absent, before the second birthday.

Longitudinal studies place the reliable emergence of spontaneous iconic gesture use closer to two years of age.

So let's look at the experimental evidence for this gap at 18 months.

Okay, researchers designed a task to specifically try and elicit iconic gestures.

They showed 18 month olds how to operate these novel toys using specific actions like stroking or banging.

And then at the test phase.

At the test phase, an adult pretended not to know what to do, and most of the infants defaulted to what they already knew, deictic gestures.

They pointed to the relevant tool or the relevant object.

But when the adult took the tool and specifically asked for clarification on the action required.

The infants failed.

They failed to invent the corresponding iconic movements like a horizontal hand movement for stroking or a vertical movement for banging.

So they could successfully communicate about the object, but they failed to create a new gesture that represented the action.

The boundary seems clearly defined between referring to a thing that is there or was there and creating an abstract sign for a movement or a concept.

And this lines up with the comprehension studies.

They indicate that reliable comprehension of newly created iconic gestures doesn't consistently appear until around 26 months of age, suggesting this is a genuine cognitive representational hurdle they have to overcome in that second year of life.

Okay, so if this intention based cooperative pointing is a uniquely human achievement that separates us from the instrumental communication of infants earliest months, then comparing human infants to our closest living relatives, the great apes, is essential.

It's essential to delineate the evolutionary roots of this difference.

And the contrast is pretty stark, I take it.

It is stark.

Great apes, chimpanzees, gorillas, orangucans, they do not naturally point for each other in the wild.

And when they do communicate with human keepers in captive or experimental settings, they operate on a fundamentally different social cognitive principle.

Their strategy is derived entirely from instrumental action attempts.

What does that mean for their communication to be derived from an instrumental action attempt?

It means they signal their intention to act on something through an abbreviated or unsuccessful or exaggerated version of the instrumental action itself, like reaching toward food.

And this strategy generates two major consequences that immediately distinguish them from human 12 month olds.

And consequence one involves how they deal with physical distance.

Exactly.

Because their signal is rooted in the instrumental action attempt, they have to decrease the physical distance between themselves and the object to express their goal.

How did you test that?

We tested this by putting food far away.

Human 12 month olds just point from a distance using the conventional gesture.

The great apes, in contrast, have to move across the enclosure and physically stick their fingers through the mesh directly in front of the food they want.

They have to minimize the distance to express their action intention.

So the infant relies on a shared, distal, conventional symbol.

The point, while the ape relies on the physical embodiment of the action itself by physically getting close to the goal.

And the second major consequence is that this instrumental strategy is strongly bound to the here and now.

Instrumental actions have to be directed at present objects.

So you tested if they could communicate about absent objects.

We did.

We tested if they could point to empty, habitual locations where food used to be.

And while they still signaled nonspecific requests, banging bars, general begging, they failed to signal specific action attempts towards that empty, habitual location.

So they could express a desire for more food, but not for the specific absent food that belongs here.

The lack of the physical object prevents the instrumental action signal.

Correct.

They couldn't signal their intention through an instrumental action attempt because there was no object to act on.

Human 12 month olds, meanwhile, just point to the empty location to specifically request the absent item.

And what about the underlying motivation?

Do apes inform or share interest the way human infants do?

Apes communicate almost exclusively to request.

They do not helpfully inform a keeper of something he needs to know, nor do they share interest in some neutral event.

This aligns with the broader consensus that the primary evolutionary divergence between humans and apes lies in this motivation to align and cooperate, what some call shared intentionality.

So apes understand instrumental actions well enough to communicate with human keepers.

Because the keeper is the tool they can use to achieve their physical goal.

But they struggle with the human point itself.

Precisely.

They fail to recover a communicative referential intention when a human points non -instrumentally with a discal index finger.

They might follow a reach, an instrumental action attempt to infer a hidden item, but they struggle to infer the intent behind that simple conventional point.

So this complex cooperative point emerges around 12 months, and it replaces the simpler, more ape -like instrumental reaching that we see earlier.

What drives this massive transformation in the first year of life?

Well, before the 12 -month mark, infants lack the full, multi -layered intentionality.

Those early social acts, like crying or smiling, are often initially what we call perlocutionary effects.

Unintended consequences.

Unintended consequences that the environment just happens to respond to.

And these are later instrumentalized by the infant.

For example, they learn to switch on and off.

They're crying.

To elicit a predictable reaction.

The full higher -order CI comes later.

But do social motives start early?

Yes.

The earliest social motives, requestive and affiliative, which is about sharing or regulating emotional states, they emerge in the first half year.

Around four months, infants vocalize in a functionally flexible way, using different vocal categories with different effective facial expressions.

And that affiliative motive is likely the deep precursor to the expressive motive we see in later declarative pointing.

And where does the capacity for specific reference come from before pointing?

The clearest limitation in the first half year is the lack of reference specification.

At eight months, infants show proto -referential behavior, and it's primarily through reaching.

They know their own action boundaries, so they won't reach for objects that are out of reach if they're alone.

But if someone else is nearby?

If someone else is nearby, they will attempt to reach again, signaling their intention to obtain the object through that instrumental action attempt.

It's an ape -like strategy.

So the infant starts with the instrumental reach, signaling, I want that, and then somehow transforms this into the conventional distal point.

What are the drivers for this transformation?

It's a beautiful interaction between cognitive achievement and social input.

It really underscores the embedded and enacted nature of this development.

On the cognitive side, research shows the skill of following a point reliably predicts the later production of pointing.

So the understanding drives the skill.

The social cognitive understanding drive the emergence of the productive skill.

But the social context is crucial here.

The environment is literally teaching the infant how to point.

The social interactional context exerts a profound influence.

Longitudinal studies show that the frequency of parents pointing around eight months is a strong predictor of the age when the infant first starts producing the index finger point themselves.

And this holds up across cultures.

It does.

Cross -cultural studies confirm that natural variation in the amount of triadic joint engagement and the use of de -ectic gestures in the environment is positively correlated with and predictive of the emergence of this key gesture.

This paints a really holistic picture.

The basic building block seems to be this deep fundamental social motivation to engage and belong.

That underlying motivation is the departure point.

The ability to refer emerges through two interacting factors.

First, the cognitive achievement of instrumental action production and understanding.

And second, a rich social context marked by a fundamental trust in others cooperativeness and helpfulness.

Because human infants are marked by this unique deep reciprocal interest, where caregivers actively mark objects for the infant and infants are motivated to share their focus with the caregiver, they are propelled beyond the purely instrumental communication of great apes, setting them firmly on the road to reference, language and shared culture.

So what does this all mean?

Our deep dive into the origins of infant communication has fundamentally recast the tiny simple act of pointing.

The core contribution is that the bedrock of human communication is built on these pre -linguistic gestures, specifically pointing, which carries three interloven layers of intention, communicative, referential and social all present around the first birthday.

And this complex multi -layered competence reveals that infants possess a powerful practical theory of mind, or what we might call a theory of action.

It allows them to flexibly track and respond to others linked epistemic,

their knowledge and creative, their desire states.

This is social cognition being enacted and embedded in real time interaction.

And crucially, this highly cooperative infant pointing, which is motivated by a desire to share and inform, it contrasts so sharply with the purely instrumental here and now requests that define great ape communication.

It's a world of difference.

Infants are establishing the cooperative foundation for shared knowledge and cultural transmission long, long before their first word.

And that cooperative foundation is the profound developmental outcome.

Social interaction is not just a stage, it is the absolute engine of learning.

As a final provocative thought for you to mull over, we saw that the ability to represent what others falsely believe emerges reliably around 18 months, right alongside the developmental limits of their representational communication, their failure to produce creative, iconic gestures.

So consider this, is the cognitive ability to internally represent others non -visible states, like a false belief, is that inherently linked to the capacity to create external non -daykick representations, like iconic gestures that stand for absent things?

Does the capacity to conceive of internal states drive the capacity to generate external symbols?

That's something for you to continue exploring on your own.

This research really highlights how much we can learn from studying the earliest forms of human connection.

Thank you for joining us on this deep dive into the extraordinary origins of the human ability to connect and communicate.

We hope you feel thoroughly well -informed.