CogSci 2025

•

August 02, 2025

•

San Francisco, United States

keywords:

social cognition

psychology

emotion

Emotional feedback plays a critical role in guiding early behaviors, yet relatively little is known about how toddlers integrate emotions from multiple informants. The present study investigated how the consistency of emotional feedback influenced toddlers’ visual exploration of novel objects. A total of 74 toddlers (12–24 months) viewed videos of eight adult informants displaying happy, sad, or neutral emotions toward unfamiliar objects. In Experiment 1, toddlers who received consistently sad feedback demonstrated reduced exploration. In Experiment 2, toddlers exposed to inconsistent emotional cues (e.g., 50% happy and 50% sad) exhibited greater exploration compared with those presented with consistent feedback. These findings suggested that toddlers’ visual exploratory behaviors were shaped not only by the valence of emotional signals but also by the degree to which these signals were consistent. In particular, a mixture of emotional feedback may enhance toddlers’ engagement with novel objects.

Downloads

Paper

Next from CogSci 2025

Integrating talker and message in language processing: the influence of speaker gender on sentence prediction in Mandarin Chinese
poster

Integrating talker and message in language processing: the influence of speaker gender on sentence prediction in Mandarin Chinese

CogSci 2025

Yun Feng and 2 other authors

02 August 2025

Similar lecture

Can 1- and 2-year-old toddlers learn causal action sequences?
poster

Can 1- and 2-year-old toddlers learn causal action sequences?

CogSci 2021

+1
Emma Tecwyn and 3 other authors

27 July 2021