Social Engagement Leads Infants to Represent People as Individuals

How do infants come to represent people’s identities? In two experiments (N = 86), we investigated 7- to 10-month-old infants’ abilities to individuate (i) one of their own caregivers and an unfamiliar adult and (ii) people who are either socially engaged or disengaged. Although classic research has found that infants at these ages do not individuate objects (e.g., a duck and a ball), the infants in our experiments individuated people, so long as those people were socially engaging. These findings suggest that infants represent people as individual entities before they do objects, which may support the formation of children’s relationships or their evaluations of others.