Examining the Robustness of Neural Correlates of Infants' Sociomoral Evaluations

Research has shown that infants prefer prosocial characters over antisocial ones, suggesting that sociomoral evaluation is early-emerging. However, some have argued that infants' preferential responses stem from low-level perceptual processes rather than true social understanding. Using electroencephalography (EEG), past work has suggested that motivational and social, but not attentional, processes are implicated in infants' responses to prosocial versus antisocial acts and individuals, however, the majority of past work utilized a single type of prosocial/antisocial interactions: helping a character to climb a hill. To test the generalizability of past neural findings from the hill paradigm, here we examined infants' responses in a distinct helping/hindering scenario in which a character tries but fails to open a box and is alternatively helped or hindered. Largely replicating past work, infants showed greater activity in social (indexed by the P400) but not attentional (indexed by the Nc) ERP components when seeing hinderers versus helpers, consistent with claims that infants' responses to prosocial and antisocial agents are social. No evidence of differential approach/avoidance motivation during prosocial/antisocial events was found. These findings support the role of social processes in infants' sociomoral evaluations.