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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2022

Humorous demonstration may enhance social learning in infants in a tool use learning task

Résumé

Humor can be defined as feeling or expressing something incongruous, surprising and funny. It is accompanied by a positive emotional response such as joy and specific behavior such as laughing or smiling (Booth-Butterfield & Booth-Butterfield, 1991; Martin, 2007; Gervais & Wilson, 2005) and is present in all types of social interactions (Apte, 1985; Lefcourt, 2001). It has been shown that humor has a positive influence on learning in adults and school aged children (Banas, Dunbar et al. 2011), yet few studies investigated the effect of humor on learning in infants. Our team was the first to show an influence of humor on social learning in infants as young as 18 months in a tool use context (Esseily, Rat-Fischer et al., 2015). In this earlier study, 64 infants had to use a rake to retrieve an out-of reach toy after a demonstration of its use by an experimenter. The demonstration was done either in a humorous or in a neutral way. Our team found that 94% of the infants who laughed when exposed to a humorous demonstration of a tool use then reproduced the target action, as compared to only 30% of infants who did not laugh or were exposed to the neutral demonstration. The aim of the current study was to assess the generalizability of the previous findings on a larger sample (110 infants at the time of submission), within a larger age group ranging from 14 to 22 months. In addition to the behavioral analysis, we used a multidimensional method testing several variables that are associated with the emergence of humor and emotions in infancy: a pretend-play measure, to test the hypothesis that humor appears as soon as infants display pretend-play behaviors, at around 18 months; physiological measures by means of a wristband to extract in a non-invasive way both cardiovascular and electrodermal data; an emotion measure by means of an automatic facial expression analysis; and a temperament measure in order to investigate inter-individual differences in infants' reactions to a humorous demonstration, by using the ECBQ questionnaire filled by parents (Putnam, Gartstein et al., 2006). Our preliminary results suggest that the perception of humor (measured by the laughing reaction at the humorous demonstration) appears around 18 months of age but does not seem to be correlated with pretend-play. In addition, infants seemed to learn better when they were exposed to a humorous demonstration regardless of whether they laughed or not, as shown on figure 1 and 2. Further analysis are currently in progress to investigate the potential factors involved in the positive association between humorous demonstration and learning such as surprise (Stahl & Feigenson, 2017). We expect that the facial expression analysis combined with the physiological data analysis will give us some cues about the emotional state of infants during the demonstration (such as surprise or emotional arousal) and its potential link with social learning.
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Dates et versions

hal-03883939 , version 1 (04-12-2022)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : hal-03883939 , version 1

Citer

Romain Di-Stasi, Rana Esseily, Lauriane Rat-Fischer. Humorous demonstration may enhance social learning in infants in a tool use learning task. XXIII International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) 2022 Developmental Cascades Congress, Jul 2022, Ottawa, Canada. ⟨hal-03883939⟩
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