Evidence for referential understanding in the emotions domain at twelve and eighteen months

Infants as young as 12 months readily modulate their behavior toward novel, ambiguous objects based on emotional responses that others display. Such s ocial-referencing skill offers powerful benefits to infants' knowledge acqu isition, but the magnitude of these benefits depends on whether they apprec iate the referential quality of others' emotional messages, and are skilled at using cues to reference (e.g., gaze direction, body posture) to guide t heir interpretation of such messages. Two studies demonstrated referential understanding in 12- and 18-month-olds' responses to another's emotional ou tburst. Infants relied on the presence versus absence of referential cues t o determine whether an emotional message should be linked with a salient, n ovel object in the first study (N = 48), and they actively consulted refere ntial cues to disambiguate the intended target of an affective display in t he second study (N = 32). These findings provide the first experimental evi dence of such sophisticated referential abilities in 12-month-olds, as well as the first evidence that infant social referencing at any age actually t rades on referential understanding.