Knowing which plants are beneficial or dangerous is a task that we cannot achieve alone; 8- to 18-month-old infants show more social looking toward adults when confronted with plants compared to other objects

The seeds of social learning: Infants exhibit more social looking for plants than other object types. Claudia E lsner, Annie E.Wertz. Cognition, Volume 183, February 2019, Pages 244-255. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2018.09.016

Highlights
•    Infants look more often to adults when confronted with plants compared to other object types.
•    The increased social looking occurs in the time before infants touch plants.
•    This strategy enables infants to glean information from others before exposure to potentially dangerous plants.

Abstract: Infants must negotiate encounters with a wide variety of different entities over the course of the first few years of life, yet investigations of their social referencing behavior have largely focused on a limited set of objects and situations such as unfamiliar toys and the visual cliff. Here we examine whether infants’ social looking strategies differ when they are confronted with plants. Plants have been fundamental to human life throughout our evolutionary history, and learning about which plants are beneficial and which are dangerous is a task that, for humans, cannot be achieved alone. Using an object exploration paradigm, we found that 8- to 18-month-old infants exhibited more social looking toward adults when confronted with plants compared to other object types. Further, this increased social looking occurred when infants first encountered plants, in the time before touching them. This social looking strategy puts infants in the best position to glean information from others before making contact with potentially dangerous plants. These findings provide a new lens through which to view infants’ social information seeking behavior.