Abstract / Summary
Animated shapes have informed much of what is known about early sociomoral cognition, but concerns have been raised about this approach and the interpretations based on it. In particular, whether infants perceive interactions between geometric agents as socially and affectively meaningful has received little direct attention, despite being a prerequisite for moral evaluations. Two preregistered experiments conducted between 2025 and 2026 addressed this gap in infants aged 6.5 to 10.5 months (N = 92; 43 girls), recruited from middle-socioeconomic-status families living in urban and suburban areas of [city name], Japan (all Japanese or other East Asian). In Experiment 1 (n = 28; 13 girls), infants preferentially attended to agent-directed, relative to perceptually matched object-directed, caressing (prosocial) and hitting (antisocial), which indicates sensitivity to social structure. In Experiment 2 (n = 64; 30 girls), infants attended more when caressing and hitting were preceded by affectively congruent rather than incongruent music (i.e., prosocial-positive, antisocial-negative), suggesting that they attributed corresponding valence to these interactions. The results substantiate the use of geometric-agent paradigms and provide evidence that foundational evaluations of good and bad emerge within the first year of life, extending prior findings beyond simple approach-avoidance responses to prosociality and antisociality.