Infants anticipate the appearance of a communicative agent

Infants show an early sensitivity to contingently exchanged signals. It was found that variability in the exchanged signal sequences in a turn-taking interaction indicates information transfer as opposed to the exchange of identical signals, and induces preverbal infants to attribute communicative agency to the interacting entities. Previous work demonstrated that faces preceded by infant-directed speech elicit a stronger face-specific N290m ERP response in 4-month-olds, suggesting that communicative signals generate the expectation of a communicative partner and facilitate the processing of its distinctive features. We argue that this effect might not be restricted to human faces, and can be elicited by unfamiliar entities that have been deemed communicative. In the present study we are investigating whether 4-month-old infants can attribute communicative agency to novel, unfamiliar agents and whether such attribution facilitates the anticipation and the processing of the agent's physical appearance. In the warm-up phase, we familiarise infants with two visually distinguishable dyads of unfamiliar entities, one dyad that engages in a turn-taking exchange of variable signals (communicative condition), and one that exchanges identical signals (non-communicative condition). In the test phase, we measure the ERPs in response to pictures of either the communicative or the non-communicative entities, preceded by the congruent sound signals. We tested 7 participants (mean age = 143 days, 6F), 4 of which were included in the preliminary analysis. We observed an enhanced N290 effect in response to the presentation of the entity belonging to the communicative dyad compared to that in response to the non-communicative entity, in the right parieto-occipital region. We expect that this effect will be consolidated with additional participants , demonstrating that 4-month-old infants anticipate the visual features of non-human communicative agents.