Moritz M Daum
Biographic Data
| ID | 1463674 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Moritz M Daum |
| GIVEN NAMES | Moritz M |
| FAMILY NAME | Daum |
| SIGNATURE | DAUM M M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Zurich |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4032-4574 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 6 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Funny Boys, Reluctant Girls? The Interaction Between Gender Stereotypes and Humour in Children
Studies suggest that men and women with stronger gender stereotypes are more likely to report that men make funnier jokes than women. However, the extent to which this perception is influenced by social context remains unclear. Here, we attempted to provide initial evidence for this question by analysing the interaction between gender stereotypes and the perception and production of humour in 10- to 12-year-old children ( N = 137) in Western Euro…
On the impact of exposure to different languages on Theory of Mind in neurotypical and autistic children
Exposure to multiple languages may support the development of Theory of Mind (ToM) in neurotypical (NT) and autistic children. However, previous research mainly applied group comparisons between monolingual and bilingual children, and the underlying mechanism of the observed difference remains unclear. The present study, therefore, sheds light on the effect of bilingualism on ToM in both NT and autistic children by measuring language experiences …
Children Learn Causatives Despite Pervasive Ellipsis: Evidence from Turkish
In this study, we explore how children learn causatives from the language they are exposed to in their everyday lives. Previous research has argued that argument structure is a crucial facilitator for learning causatives. Here, we examine the role of argument structure in the acquisition of morphological and lexical causatives. We use Turkish as a test case which allows argument ellipsis and ask whether reliable argument expression is a key facto…
Diversity in monolingual and multilingual communicative environments and its relation to vocabulary in early childhood
Research on multilingualism often assumes homogeneity within monolingual and multilingual groups, overlooking diversity in language environments, such as differences in language exposure and combinations. This study examines three such diversity indicators – language entropy, context entropy and linguistic distance – and their relationship to vocabulary in 4- to 5-year-old mono- and multilingual children ( N = 257). Results reveal significantly g…
Do Facial Masks Impact Infants' Joint Attention? A Within‐Participant Laboratory Study
During the COVID‐19 pandemic, children were repeatedly confronted with people wearing facial masks. Little is known, however, about how this affected young children's interactions with their caregivers. This preregistered experimental within‐participants study explored whether facial masks influence young children's initiation and response to joint attention. Using two structured tasks and one free‐play task, we measured joint attention episodes …
The Relation Between Goal‐Predictive Gaze Behavior and Imitation—A Live Eye‐Tracking Study in 12‐Month‐Olds
Children learn from others by imitating observed behavior. According to some theorists, to imitate an agent's action, infants need to identify the agent's action goal. To test this assumption, goal‐predictive gaze shifts of 104 German 12‐month‐olds (57 female) were measured using live eye‐tracking. These goal‐predictive gaze shifts were related to their imitation of an action performed by a live model. This relationship was controlled for in term…
The two functions of imitation in the second year of life: A longitudinal study
Infant imitation serves a cognitive and a social function. As part of their temperament, infants' attention and social orientation mirror these two functions. This longitudinal study investigated the development of the two functions within the second year of life in German infants ( N = 136, 74 female), using standardized tests at the ages of 12, 18, and 24 months, conducted in 2018 and 2019. We measured temperament using two established parental…
Children Find Others’ Misfortune Funnier Than Adults
This study investigated the perceived funniness of misfortune in children and adults, examining the role of the misfortune victims’ facial expressions. Participants included 100 psychology undergraduates and 97 4‐ to 5‐year‐olds from a middle‐European country. Participants were presented with pictures in which misfortune victims exhibited either angry or painful expressions (affective), funny expressions (comic), or no visible facial expression (…
Duration of face mask exposure matters: Evidence from Swiss and Brazilian kindergartners’ ability to recognise emotions
Wearing facial masks became a common practice worldwide during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study investigated (1) whether facial masks that cover adult faces affect 4- to 6-year-old children’s recognition of emotions in those faces and (2) whether the duration of children’s exposure to masks is associated with emotion recognition. We tested children from Switzerland (N = 38) and Brazil (N = 41). Brazil represented longer mask exposure due to a st…
What's the point? Infants' and adults' perception of different pointing gestures
Adults and infants as young as 4 months old orient to pointing gestures. Although adults are shown to orient faster to index‐finger pointing than other hand shapes, it is unknown whether hand shapes influence infants' perception of pointing. In this study, we used a spatial cueing paradigm on an eye tracker to investigate whether and to what extent adults and 12‐month‐old infants orient their attention in the direction of pointing gestures with d…
The Agent Preference in Visual Event Apprehension
A central aspect of human experience and communication is understanding events in terms of agent (“doer”) and patient (“undergoer” of action) roles. These event roles are rooted in general cognition and prominently encoded in language, with agents appearing as more salient and preferred over patients. An unresolved question is whether this preference for agents already operates during apprehension, that is, the earliest stage of event processing,…
What do you focus on? An investigation of goal focus from childhood to old age
Goals constitute an important construct in developmental psychology. They represent a central way in which individuals shape their development. Here, we present two studies on age-related differences in one important goal dimension, goal focus, that is, the relative salience of the means and ends of goal pursuit. Extant studies on age-related differences in adults suggest a shift from focusing on the ends to focusing on the means across adulthood…
Chasing the “How” and “Why” of goal pursuit: A multimethod approach to the study of goal focus
Goals are cognitive representations of means-ends relations that reflect what a person wants to approach or avoid. Previous research has demonstrated that the relative salience of the means and ends (i.e., goal focus) differs across adulthood. Due to inconsistent findings in recent studies, this study systematically investigated the convergence of goal focus across different dimensions (i.e., goal content, complexity, type, i.e., hypothetical vs.…
Do typological differences in the expression of causality influence preschool children’s causal event construal
This study investigated whether cross-linguistic differences in causal expressions influence the mapping of causal language on causal events in three- to four-year-old Swiss-German learners and Turkish learners. In Swiss-German, causality is mainly expressed syntactically with lexical causatives (e.g., ässe ‘to eat’ vs. füettere ‘to feed’). In Turkish, causality is expressed both syntactically and morphologically – with a verbal suffix (e.g., yem…
Spelling out some unaddressed conceptual and methodological challenges in empirical lifespan research
The importance of taking a lifespan approach to describe and understand human development has long been acknowledged (e.g., Baltes, 1987). Nevertheless, theoretical or empirical research that actually encompasses the entire lifespan, that is, from early childhood to old age, is rare. This is not surprising given the challenges such an approach entails. Many of these challenges (e.g., establishing measurement invariance between age groups) have be…
How experience shapes infants' communicative behaviour: Comparing gaze following in infants with and without pandemic experience
The COVID‐19 pandemic has been influencing people's social life substantially. Everybody, including infants and children needed to adapt to changes in social interactions (e.g., social distancing) and to seeing other people wearing facial masks. In this study, we investigated whether these pandemic‐related changes influenced 12‐ to 15‐months‐old infants' reactions to observed gaze shifts (i.e., their gaze following). In two eye‐tracking tasks, we…
Compatibility Effects in Young Children's Tool Use: Learning and Transfer
An inherent component of tool-use actions is the transformation of the user's operating movement into the desired effect. In this study, the relevance of this transformation for young children's learning of tool-use actions was investigated. Sixty-four children at the age of 27–30 months learned to use levers which either simply extended (compatible transformation) or reversed (incompatible transformation) their operating movements. Data revealed…
Parenting Styles of Gay Fathers
Little is known about the parenting style of male couples who become fathers via surrogacy, adoption or fostering. In a European study, 35 gay fathers and 33 heterosexual fathers answered questionnaires with respect to their parenting style with their first-born child, temperament characteristics of that child, and their own personality. The results indicate that gay fathers show higher levels of warmth and cooperation with their partner than het…
When dogs meow: An electrophysiological study of lexical–semantic processing in toddlers
The goal of this study was to investigate lexical–semantic processing at an early phase of language development. Adults often communicate with children using infant ‐ directed speech that typically involves lexical and syntactic modifications such as onomatopoeias (Soderstrom, 2007). Here, we asked how and when children start to show an advantage for processing conventional linguistic forms, such as common nouns, and consequently decreasing sensi…
Does Linguistic Similarity Affect Early Simultaneous Bilingual Language Acquisition
It is well established that L2 acquisition is faster when the L2 is more closely related to the learner’s L1. In the current study we investigated whether language similarity has a comparable facilitative effect in early simultaneous bilingual children. The similarity between each bilingual child’s two languages was determined using phonological and typological scales. We compared the vocabulary size of bilingual toddlers learning different pairs…
Dynamic interaction patterns of monolingual and bilingual infants with their parents
Bilingual children show a number of advantages in the domain of communication. The aim of the current study was to investigate whether differences in interactions are present before productive language skills emerge. For a duration of 5 minutes, 64 parents and their 14-month-old infants explored a decorated room together. The coordination of their behaviors in the modalities of action, language, and gesture was coded. The results showed no differ…
Bilex: A new tool measuring bilingual children’s lexicons and translational equivalents
The current study describes the development and validation of a novel scale (BILEX) designed to assess young bilingual children’s receptive vocabulary in both languages, their conceptual vocabulary, and translational equivalents. BILEX was developed to facilitate the assessment of vocabulary size for both of the children’s languages within one session without any transfer from one language to the other. One-hundred-and-eighty-two 3-year-old child…
Productive Verbs Facilitate Action Prediction in Toddlers
Children can represent events in our everyday life in both non‐linguistic and linguistic formats. We aimed to investigate whether non‐linguistic representations are changed once children acquire their linguistic counterparts. In the present study, we explored whether and how language changes the perception of simple means‐end actions using an eye‐tracking paradigm. Children between 12 and 24 months of age heard a sentence containing a verb and su…
Spatial orienting following dynamic cues in infancy: Grasping hands versus inanimate objects
Movement perception facilitates spatial orienting of attention in infants (Farroni, Johnson, Brockbank, & Simion, 2000). In a series of 4 experiments, we investigated how orienting of attention in infancy is modulated by dynamic stimuli. Experiment 1 (N = 36) demonstrated that 5-month-olds as well as 7-month-olds orient to the direction of a dynamically grasping human hand. Experiment 2 (N = 36) showed that 7-month-olds orient covertly to directi…
The development of pointing perception in infancy: Effects of communicative signals on covert shifts of attention
The present study aims to investigate the interplay of verbal and nonverbal communication with respect to infants' perception of pointing gestures. Infants were presented with still images of pointing hands (cue) in combination with an acoustic stimulus. The communicative content of this acoustic stimulus was varied from being human and communicative to artificial. Saccadic reaction times (SRTs) from the cue to a peripheral target were measured a…
Becoming a social agent: Developmental foundations of an embodied social psychology
In this paper, we argue that young infants serve as ideal models for disentangling the relative contributions of embodied and symbolic processes to mature social cognition and behavior. Based on evidence suggesting that infants possess a nascent ability to understand others' actions, and to interact and communicate with others in meaningful ways, we argue that the embodiment processes underlying these skills in infancy may also account for a sign…
Does Linguistic Similarity Affect Early Simultaneous Bilingual Language Acquisition
It is well established that L2 acquisition is faster when the L2 is more closely related to the learner’s L1. In the current study we investigated whether language similarity has a comparable facilitative effect in early simultaneous bilingual children. The similarity between each bilingual child’s two languages was determined using phonological and typological scales. We compared the vocabulary size of bilingual toddlers learning different pairs…
The development of pointing perception in infancy: Effects of communicative signals on covert shifts of attention
The present study aims to investigate the interplay of verbal and nonverbal communication with respect to infants' perception of pointing gestures. Infants were presented with still images of pointing hands (cue) in combination with an acoustic stimulus. The communicative content of this acoustic stimulus was varied from being human and communicative to artificial. Saccadic reaction times (SRTs) from the cue to a peripheral target were measured a…
Means‐End Behavior in Young Infants: The Interplay of Action Perception and Action Production
In 2 experiments, the interplay of action perception and action production was investigated in 6‐month‐old infants. In Experiment 1, infants received 2 versions of a means‐end task in counterbalanced order. In the action perception version, a preferential looking paradigm in which infants were shown an actor performing means‐end behavior with an expected and an unexpected outcome was used. In the action production version, infants had to pull a c…
The Development of Rational Imitation in 9‐ and 12‐Month‐Old Infants
Studies on rational imitation have provided evidence for the fact that infants as young as 12 months of age engage in rational imitation. However, the developmental onset of this ability is unclear. In this study, we investigated whether 9‐ and 12‐month‐olds detect voluntary and implicit as well as nonvoluntary and explicit constraints in the head touch task. Three groups of infants watched video sequences, which displayed a person illuminating a…
Disentangling embodied and symbolic modes of social understanding
Becoming a social agent: Developmental foundations of an embodied social psychology
In this paper, we argue that young infants serve as ideal models for disentangling the relative contributions of embodied and symbolic processes to mature social cognition and behavior. Based on evidence suggesting that infants possess a nascent ability to understand others' actions, and to interact and communicate with others in meaningful ways, we argue that the embodiment processes underlying these skills in infancy may also account for a sign…
The development of pointing perception in infancy: Effects of communicative signals on covert shifts of attention
The present study aims to investigate the interplay of verbal and nonverbal communication with respect to infants' perception of pointing gestures. Infants were presented with still images of pointing hands (cue) in combination with an acoustic stimulus. The communicative content of this acoustic stimulus was varied from being human and communicative to artificial. Saccadic reaction times (SRTs) from the cue to a peripheral target were measured a…
Productive Verbs Facilitate Action Prediction in Toddlers
Children can represent events in our everyday life in both non‐linguistic and linguistic formats. We aimed to investigate whether non‐linguistic representations are changed once children acquire their linguistic counterparts. In the present study, we explored whether and how language changes the perception of simple means‐end actions using an eye‐tracking paradigm. Children between 12 and 24 months of age heard a sentence containing a verb and su…
Spatial orienting following dynamic cues in infancy: Grasping hands versus inanimate objects
Movement perception facilitates spatial orienting of attention in infants (Farroni, Johnson, Brockbank, & Simion, 2000). In a series of 4 experiments, we investigated how orienting of attention in infancy is modulated by dynamic stimuli. Experiment 1 (N = 36) demonstrated that 5-month-olds as well as 7-month-olds orient to the direction of a dynamically grasping human hand. Experiment 2 (N = 36) showed that 7-month-olds orient covertly to directi…
Bilex: A new tool measuring bilingual children’s lexicons and translational equivalents
The current study describes the development and validation of a novel scale (BILEX) designed to assess young bilingual children’s receptive vocabulary in both languages, their conceptual vocabulary, and translational equivalents. BILEX was developed to facilitate the assessment of vocabulary size for both of the children’s languages within one session without any transfer from one language to the other. One-hundred-and-eighty-two 3-year-old child…
Dynamic interaction patterns of monolingual and bilingual infants with their parents
Bilingual children show a number of advantages in the domain of communication. The aim of the current study was to investigate whether differences in interactions are present before productive language skills emerge. For a duration of 5 minutes, 64 parents and their 14-month-old infants explored a decorated room together. The coordination of their behaviors in the modalities of action, language, and gesture was coded. The results showed no differ…
Compatibility Effects in Young Children's Tool Use: Learning and Transfer
An inherent component of tool-use actions is the transformation of the user's operating movement into the desired effect. In this study, the relevance of this transformation for young children's learning of tool-use actions was investigated. Sixty-four children at the age of 27–30 months learned to use levers which either simply extended (compatible transformation) or reversed (incompatible transformation) their operating movements. Data revealed…
Parenting Styles of Gay Fathers
Little is known about the parenting style of male couples who become fathers via surrogacy, adoption or fostering. In a European study, 35 gay fathers and 33 heterosexual fathers answered questionnaires with respect to their parenting style with their first-born child, temperament characteristics of that child, and their own personality. The results indicate that gay fathers show higher levels of warmth and cooperation with their partner than het…
When dogs meow: An electrophysiological study of lexical–semantic processing in toddlers
The goal of this study was to investigate lexical–semantic processing at an early phase of language development. Adults often communicate with children using infant ‐ directed speech that typically involves lexical and syntactic modifications such as onomatopoeias (Soderstrom, 2007). Here, we asked how and when children start to show an advantage for processing conventional linguistic forms, such as common nouns, and consequently decreasing sensi…
Does Linguistic Similarity Affect Early Simultaneous Bilingual Language Acquisition
It is well established that L2 acquisition is faster when the L2 is more closely related to the learner’s L1. In the current study we investigated whether language similarity has a comparable facilitative effect in early simultaneous bilingual children. The similarity between each bilingual child’s two languages was determined using phonological and typological scales. We compared the vocabulary size of bilingual toddlers learning different pairs…
Do typological differences in the expression of causality influence preschool children’s causal event construal
This study investigated whether cross-linguistic differences in causal expressions influence the mapping of causal language on causal events in three- to four-year-old Swiss-German learners and Turkish learners. In Swiss-German, causality is mainly expressed syntactically with lexical causatives (e.g., ässe ‘to eat’ vs. füettere ‘to feed’). In Turkish, causality is expressed both syntactically and morphologically – with a verbal suffix (e.g., yem…
Spelling out some unaddressed conceptual and methodological challenges in empirical lifespan research
The importance of taking a lifespan approach to describe and understand human development has long been acknowledged (e.g., Baltes, 1987). Nevertheless, theoretical or empirical research that actually encompasses the entire lifespan, that is, from early childhood to old age, is rare. This is not surprising given the challenges such an approach entails. Many of these challenges (e.g., establishing measurement invariance between age groups) have be…
How experience shapes infants' communicative behaviour: Comparing gaze following in infants with and without pandemic experience
The COVID‐19 pandemic has been influencing people's social life substantially. Everybody, including infants and children needed to adapt to changes in social interactions (e.g., social distancing) and to seeing other people wearing facial masks. In this study, we investigated whether these pandemic‐related changes influenced 12‐ to 15‐months‐old infants' reactions to observed gaze shifts (i.e., their gaze following). In two eye‐tracking tasks, we…
The Agent Preference in Visual Event Apprehension
A central aspect of human experience and communication is understanding events in terms of agent (“doer”) and patient (“undergoer” of action) roles. These event roles are rooted in general cognition and prominently encoded in language, with agents appearing as more salient and preferred over patients. An unresolved question is whether this preference for agents already operates during apprehension, that is, the earliest stage of event processing,…
What do you focus on? An investigation of goal focus from childhood to old age
Goals constitute an important construct in developmental psychology. They represent a central way in which individuals shape their development. Here, we present two studies on age-related differences in one important goal dimension, goal focus, that is, the relative salience of the means and ends of goal pursuit. Extant studies on age-related differences in adults suggest a shift from focusing on the ends to focusing on the means across adulthood…
Chasing the “How” and “Why” of goal pursuit: A multimethod approach to the study of goal focus
Goals are cognitive representations of means-ends relations that reflect what a person wants to approach or avoid. Previous research has demonstrated that the relative salience of the means and ends (i.e., goal focus) differs across adulthood. Due to inconsistent findings in recent studies, this study systematically investigated the convergence of goal focus across different dimensions (i.e., goal content, complexity, type, i.e., hypothetical vs.…
Duration of face mask exposure matters: Evidence from Swiss and Brazilian kindergartners’ ability to recognise emotions
Wearing facial masks became a common practice worldwide during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study investigated (1) whether facial masks that cover adult faces affect 4- to 6-year-old children’s recognition of emotions in those faces and (2) whether the duration of children’s exposure to masks is associated with emotion recognition. We tested children from Switzerland (N = 38) and Brazil (N = 41). Brazil represented longer mask exposure due to a st…
What's the point? Infants' and adults' perception of different pointing gestures
Adults and infants as young as 4 months old orient to pointing gestures. Although adults are shown to orient faster to index‐finger pointing than other hand shapes, it is unknown whether hand shapes influence infants' perception of pointing. In this study, we used a spatial cueing paradigm on an eye tracker to investigate whether and to what extent adults and 12‐month‐old infants orient their attention in the direction of pointing gestures with d…
Diversity in monolingual and multilingual communicative environments and its relation to vocabulary in early childhood
Research on multilingualism often assumes homogeneity within monolingual and multilingual groups, overlooking diversity in language environments, such as differences in language exposure and combinations. This study examines three such diversity indicators – language entropy, context entropy and linguistic distance – and their relationship to vocabulary in 4- to 5-year-old mono- and multilingual children ( N = 257). Results reveal significantly g…
Do Facial Masks Impact Infants' Joint Attention? A Within‐Participant Laboratory Study
During the COVID‐19 pandemic, children were repeatedly confronted with people wearing facial masks. Little is known, however, about how this affected young children's interactions with their caregivers. This preregistered experimental within‐participants study explored whether facial masks influence young children's initiation and response to joint attention. Using two structured tasks and one free‐play task, we measured joint attention episodes …
The Relation Between Goal‐Predictive Gaze Behavior and Imitation—A Live Eye‐Tracking Study in 12‐Month‐Olds
Children learn from others by imitating observed behavior. According to some theorists, to imitate an agent's action, infants need to identify the agent's action goal. To test this assumption, goal‐predictive gaze shifts of 104 German 12‐month‐olds (57 female) were measured using live eye‐tracking. These goal‐predictive gaze shifts were related to their imitation of an action performed by a live model. This relationship was controlled for in term…
The two functions of imitation in the second year of life: A longitudinal study
Infant imitation serves a cognitive and a social function. As part of their temperament, infants' attention and social orientation mirror these two functions. This longitudinal study investigated the development of the two functions within the second year of life in German infants ( N = 136, 74 female), using standardized tests at the ages of 12, 18, and 24 months, conducted in 2018 and 2019. We measured temperament using two established parental…
Psychology (26 works) · Developmental psychology (17 works) · Child and Animal Learning Development (16 works) · Cognitive psychology (14 works) · Linguistics (10 works) · Action Observation and Synchronization (8 works) · Social Psychology (8 works) · Communication (7 works) · Computer Science (7 works) · Cognition (6 works)