Philippe Rochat

Tricia Striano

Emory University

Recent progress in infancy research demonstrates that early on, infants
perceive physical objects and expect them to behave according to core
principles. These principles include the fact that objects are substantial,
occupy space, and cannot be in two places at the same time ( Spelke, 1991).
Because infants appear to apply these physical principles at an age when
they cannot yet have much hands-on experience with objects (2 to 4
months), and unless we assume that these principles are prewired in the
neonate, it is likely that they are acquired via active contemplation of things
behaving around them (see the description of the "astronomer infant" by
Lécuyer, 1989; or the "'couch potato' infant" by Willatts, 1997). The nu-
merous studies demonstrating precocious physical knowledge using pref-
erential looking, habituation, or violation of expectation paradigms suggest
that this knowledge does not develop primarily from active causation
whereby infants learn about objects by analyzing the consequences of their
own actions on them. Is this also the case for the development of early
social cognition? In this chapter, we suggest that the developing under-
standing of people in infancy cannot be reduced to what we know regarding
the precocious development of physical knowledge. People are more com-
plex than objects, and the development of social knowledge is based on
specific processes that reflect this greater complexity.

Intimate, one-to-one relationships are the craddle of social under-
standing. Although much can be learned from watching people at a dis-
tance and not being directly engaged in a social exchange, such learning

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