Inference of social affinity from movement dynamics in 3-6-year-olds

Existing research shows that preschoolers and even preverbal infants infer social affinity between third parties who move similarly, i.e. who display the same form of movement either synchronously (in tempo) or not. In this research, we tease apart the respective contribution of spatial (form) and temporal movement similarities in children’s social affinity inferences from a third-person perspective. We asked 83 3-6-year-olds to guess a pair of friends among a trio of puppets moving simultaneously. All possible combinations of movement similarity based on form and/or tempo within the trio were tested in seven successive conditions (within subject design). We found no evidence of the use of temporal synchrony to guess the pair of friends, while form similarity begins to be used from age 3 and is systematically used by age 6. A control study with 20 6-year-olds suggests that this inference is primarily social, not a mere generic default guessing.