Abstract
We investigated infants’ response to pedagogy in the domain of tool use. In experiment 1, infants viewed a causally relevant tool-use demonstration presented identically in either a social/pedagogical or social/non-pedagogical context. Infants exposed to pedagogical cues displayed superior production of the tool-use sequence. This was so despite infants displaying equivalent attention to the demonstration across conditions. In contrast, pedagogical cues had no systematic impact on infants’ discrimination between causally possible vs. impossible tool-use sequences in a looking-time task. Interestingly, however, older infants across both conditions displayed a preference for looking toward the causally possible display. Experiment 2 documented that social cues of any sort (regardless of pedagogy) accompanying the demonstration triggered older infants to discriminate the causally possible vs. impossible events whereas a non-social demonstration did not. Together, the two experiments implicate ‘social gating’ as well as a pedagogical stance in infants’ processing and execution of causal action.