Adapting Social Behavior: Child's Play

A new study proposes that infants integrate perceptual information, memories, and current physiological state to determine the optimal behavior in any social context through a value-driven decision-making process. The study suggests that infants first encode social cues in each context, process these social stimuli to form a representation of the current social situation, and then calculate and compare the values of different alternative actions within a particular social situation. Infants finally choose to perform the optimal action that has the highest action value, that is, one that will result in the most suitable response/outcome in that social situation.