Do 12.5-month-old infants consider what objects others can see when interpreting their actions?

Understanding a Third-Party Communicative Situation in Korean-Learning Infants

The present study tested 14-month-old monolingual infants (N = 64, 52% female, 75% Korean, and 25% American) in a looking-time task adapted from previous referent identification research. In three experiments, Korean-learning infants watched a speaker, who could only see one of two identical balls, ask a recipient, "gong jom jul-lae?" ("Will you give me Ø ball?" because Korean lacks an article system). They expected the recipient to reach for the ball visible to the speaker, but not the one hidden from her, only when the speaker was introduced separately to facilitate perspective-taking. Korean infants were also found to hold these expectations when the speaker said, "jeo gong jom jul-lae?" ("Will you give me that ball?"), presumably because the added demonstrative "jeo" rendered the speech more informative. A group of American English-learning infants performed similarly, but not as robustly as did their Korean peers, when the speaker requested "Give me that ball." These findings shed new light on how infants use their emergent perspective-taking and language skills to interpret a speaker's intended referent and expand the previous focus on English-learning infants.

The Cognitive Architecture of Infant Attachment

Meta-analytic evidence indicates that the quality of the attachment relationship that infants establish with their primary caregiver has enduring significance for socioemotional and cognitive outcomes. However, the mechanisms by which early attachment experiences contribute to subsequent development remain underspecified. According to attachment theory, early attachment experiences become embodied in the form of cognitive-affective representations, referred to as internal working models (IWMs), that guide future behavior. Little is known, however, about the cognitive architecture of IWMs in infancy. In this article, we discuss significant advances made in the field of infant cognitive development and propose that leveraging insights from this research has the potential to fundamentally shape our understanding of the cognitive architecture of attachment representations in infancy. We also propose that the integration of attachment research into cognitive research can shed light on the role of early experiences, individual differences, and stability and change in infant cognition, as well as open new routes of investigation in cognitive studies, which will further our understanding of human knowledge. We provide recommendations for future research throughout the article and conclude by using our collaborative research as an example.

Do toddlers reason about other people's experiences of objects? A limit to early mental state reasoning

Human social life requires an understanding of the mental states of one's social partners. Two people who look at the same objects often experience them differently, as a twinkling light or a planet, a 6 or a 9, and a random cat or Cleo, their pet. Indeed, a primary purpose of communication is to share distinctive experiences of objects or events. Here, we test whether toddlers (14-15 months) are sensitive to another agent's distinctive experiences of pictures when determining the goal underlying the agent's actions in a minimally social context. We conducted nine experiments. Across seven of these experiments (n = 206), toddlers viewed either videotaped or live events in which an actor, whose perspective differed from their own, reached (i) for pictures of human faces that were upright or inverted or (ii) for pictures that depicted a rabbit or a duck at different orientations. Then either the actor or the toddler moved to a new location that aligned their perspectives, and the actor alternately reached to each of the two pictures. By comparing toddlers' looking to the latter reaches, we tested whether their goal attributions accorded with the actor's experience of the pictured objects, with their own experience of the pictured objects, or with no consistency. In no experiment did toddlers encode the actor's goal in accord with his experiences of the pictures. In contrast, in a similar experiment that manipulated the visibility of a picture rather than the experience that it elicited, toddlers (n = 32) correctly expected the actor's action to depend on what was visible and occluded to him, rather than to themselves. In a verbal version of the tasks, older children (n = 35) correctly inferred the actor's goal in both cases. These findings provide further evidence for a dissociation between two kinds of mental state reasoning: When toddlers view an actor's object-directed action under minimally social conditions, they take account of the actor's visual access to the object but not the actor's distinctive experience of the object.

Better Together: 14-Month-Old Infants Expect Agents to Cooperate

Humans engage in cooperative activities from early on and the breadth of human cooperation is unparalleled. Human preference for cooperation might reflect cognitive and motivational mechanisms that drive engagement in cooperative activities. Here we investigate early indices of humans' cooperative abilities and test whether 14-month-old infants expect agents to prefer cooperative over individual goal achievement. Three groups of infants saw videos of agents facing a choice between two actions that led to identical rewards but differed in the individual costs. Our results show that, in line with prior research, infants expect agents to make instrumentally rational choices and prefer the less costly of two individual action alternatives. In contrast, when one of the action alternatives is cooperative, infants expect agents to choose cooperation over individual action, even though the cooperative action demands more effort from each agent to achieve the same outcome. Finally, we do not find evidence that infants expect agents to choose the less costly alternative when both options entail cooperative action. Combined, these results indicate an ontogenetically early expectation of cooperation, and raise interesting implications and questions regarding the nature of infants' representations of cooperative actions and their utility.

Validation of an open source, remote web-based eye-tracking method (WebGazer) for research in early childhood

Measuring eye movements remotely via the participant's webcam promises to be an attractive methodological addition to in-person eye-tracking in the lab. However, there is a lack of systematic research comparing remote web-based eye-tracking with in-lab eye-tracking in young children. We report a multi-lab study that compared these two measures in an anticipatory looking task with toddlers using WebGazer.js and jsPsych. Results of our remotely tested sample of 18-27-month-old toddlers (N = 125) revealed that web-based eye-tracking successfully captured goal-based action predictions, although the proportion of the goal-directed anticipatory looking was lower compared to the in-lab sample (N = 70). As expected, attrition rate was substantially higher in the web-based (42%) than the in-lab sample (10%). Excluding trials based on visual inspection of the match of time-locked gaze coordinates and the participant's webcam video overlayed on the stimuli was an important preprocessing step to reduce noise in the data. We discuss the use of this remote web-based method in comparison with other current methodological innovations. Our study demonstrates that remote web-based eye-tracking can be a useful tool for testing toddlers, facilitating recruitment of larger and more diverse samples; a caveat to consider is the larger drop-out rate.

More than one path to pragmatics? Insights from children's grasp of implicit, figurative and ironical meaning

Human communication requires impressive inferential abilities and mind-reading skills. To learn how to speak and become competent communicators children need both. The development of pragmatic abilities presents us with a puzzle. On the one hand, much evidence suggests pragmatics play a grounding role in early communication and language acquisition. On the other, preschoolers find linguistic pragmatic inferences such as implicatures, metaphor and irony difficult to grasp. Apperly and Butterfill (2009) maintain that there are two separate systems for belief reasoning: a simpler one and a more sophisticated one that develops later. Along this line of reasoning we might also expect there to be two separate kinds of pragmatic abilities: an early set using (among other things) the simpler Theory of Mind system, and a more sophisticated one appearing later in childhood and using full-blown Theory of Mind. I will argue there is no need to divide pragmatic abilities in such a way to bridge the gap between the pragmatic inferential skills found in toddlers and the difficulties observed in preschoolers. Evidence from the past two decades indicates that phenomena such as implicatures and metaphor (but not irony) can be understood earlier than previously established. Additionally, children's apparent struggle with specific pragmatic inferences might be better explained by factors independent from pragmatic competence, but which interact with it.

Objects in a social world: Infants' object representational capacity limits are shaped by objects' social relevance

Several decades of research have revealed consistent signature limits on infants' ability to represent objects. However, these signature representational limits were established with methods that often removed objects from their most common context. In infants' everyday lives, objects are very often social artifacts: they are the targets of agents' goal-directed actions, communications, and beliefs, and may have social content or relevance themselves. In this chapter, we explore the relationship between infants' object representational capacity limits and their processing of the social world. We review evidence that the social content and context of objects can shift infants' object representational limits. We discuss how taking the social world into account can yield more robust and ecologically valid estimates of infants' early representational capacities.

Helpers or halos: examining the evaluative mechanisms underlying selective prosociality

This research examines the proximate evaluative mechanisms underlying prosocial partner choice-based reciprocity. Across four studies we presented 855 university undergraduates (online for course credit) and 76 4- to 6-year-olds (offline at a university laboratory) with vignettes describing prosocial, social and non-social characters, and asked participants about their person preferences in prosocial, social and general contexts. Adults demonstrated sophisticated appraisals, coordinating between relevant trait and contextual cues to make selections. Adults were particularly attentive to prosocial cues in costly conditions, suggesting that they were using dispositional attributions to make their selections. By contrast, children were largely unable to integrate trait and contextual cues in determining their partner preferences, instead displaying valenced preferences for non-social cues, suggesting the use of affective tagging. Together, these studies demonstrate that the mechanisms underlying prosocial, partner choice-based reciprocity are not early emerging and stable but show considerable development over the lifespan.

Commonsense psychology in human infants and machines

Human infants are fascinated by other people. They bring to this fascination a constellation of rich and flexible expectations about the intentions motivating people's actions. Here we test 11-month-old infants and state-of-the-art learning-driven neural-network models on the "Baby Intuitions Benchmark (BIB)," a suite of tasks challenging both infants and machines to make high-level predictions about the underlying causes of agents' actions. Infants expected agents' actions to be directed towards objects, not locations, and infants demonstrated default expectations about agents' rationally efficient actions towards goals. The neural-network models failed to capture infants' knowledge. Our work provides a comprehensive framework in which to characterize infants' commonsense psychology and takes the first step in testing whether human knowledge and human-like artificial intelligence can be built from the foundations cognitive and developmental theories postulate.

Understanding preferences in infancy

A preference is defined as a dispositional state that helps explain why a person chooses one option over another. Preference understanding is a significant part of interpreting and predicting others' behavior, which can also help to guide social encounters, for instance, to initiate interactions and even form relationships based on shared preferences. Cognitive developmental research in the past several decades has revealed that infants have relatively sophisticated understandings about others' preferences, as part of investigations into how young children make sense of others' behavior in terms of mental states such as intentions, dispositions including preferences, and epistemic states. In recent years, research on early psychological knowledge expands to including infant understanding of social situations. As such, infants are also found to use their preference understandings in their social life. They treat favorably others who share their own preferences, and they prefer prosocial and similar others (e.g., those who speak their language). In reviewing these results, we point out future directions for research and conclude with further suggestions and recommendations. This article is categorized under: Cognitive Biology > Cognitive Development Psychology > Development and Aging.

Canine perspective-taking

An important question in the study of canine cognition is how dogs understand humans, given that they show impressive abilities for interacting and communicating with us. In this review, we describe and discuss studies that have investigated dogs' perspective-taking abilities. There is solid evidence that dogs are not only sensitive to the gaze of others, but also their attention. We specifically address the question whether dogs have the ability to take the perspective of others and thus come to understand what others can or cannot perceive. From the latter, they may then infer what others know and use this representation to anticipate what others do next. Still, dogs might simply rely on directly observable cues and on what they themselves can perceive when they assess what others can perceive. And instead of making inferences from representations of others' mental states, they may have just learned that certain behaviours of ours lead to certain outcomes. However, recent research seems to challenge this low-level explanation. Dogs have solved several perspective-taking tasks instantly and reliably across a large number of variations, including geometrical gaze-following, stealing in the dark, concealing information from others, and Guesser/Knower differentiation. In the latter studies, dogs' choices between two human informants were strongly influenced by cues related to the humans' visual access to the food, even when the two informants behaved identically. And finally, we review a recent study that found dogs reacting differently to misleading suggestions of human informants that have either a true or false belief about the location of food. We discuss this surprising result in terms of the comprehension of reality-incongruent mental states, which is considered as a hallmark of Theory of Mind acquisition in human development. Especially on the basis of the latter findings, we conclude that pet dogs might be sensitive to what others see, know, intend, and believe. Therefore, this ability seems to have evolved not just in the corvid and primate lineages, but also in dogs.

Emerging Self-Representation Presents a Challenge When Perspectives Conflict

The capacity to take another's perspective appears to be present from early in life, with young infants ostensibly able to predict others' behaviour even when the self and other perspective are at odds. Yet, infants' abilities are difficult to reconcile with the well-known problems that older children have with ignoring their own perspective. Here we show that it is the development of the self-perspective, at around 18 months, that creates a perspective conflict between self and other during a non-verbal perspective-tracking scenario. Using mirror self-recognition as a measure of self-awareness and pupil dilation to index conflict processing, our results show that mirror recognisers perceive greater conflict during action anticipation, specifically in a high inhibitory demand condition, in which conflict between self and other should be particularly salient.

Imagination and social cognition in childhood

Imagination is a cognitive process used to generate new ideas from old, not just in the service of creativity and fantasy, but also in our ordinary thoughts about alternatives to current reality. In this article, I argue for the central function of imagination in the development of social cognition in infancy and childhood. In Section 1, I review a work showing that even in the first year of life, social cognition can be viewed through a nascent ability to imagine the physical possibilities and physical limits on action. In Section 2, I discuss how imagination of what should happen is appropriately constrained by what can happen, and how this influences children's moral evaluations. In the final section, I suggest developmental changes in imagination—especially the ability to imagine improbable events—may have implications for social inference, leading children to learn that inner motives can conflict. These examples point to a flexible and domain‐general process that operates on knowledge to make social meaning.

This article is categorized under:

Psychology > Development and Aging

Cognitive Biology > Cognitive Development

Philosophy > Knowledge and Belief

"I know what's inside because you showed me": Training 33-month-old children to attribute knowledge and ignorance to themselves and others

The present study investigated the role of language in two-year-old children's early understanding of knowledge and ignorance. An intense microgenetic training consisting of 12 to 14 training sessions within six to seven weeks was conducted between 33 and 36 months. One training group experienced and participated in discourse about epistemic states in theoretically relevant situations which highlighted, for instance, the relation between seeing and knowing or contrasts between different people's knowledge states. The other training group was trained on complement syntax using sentence repetition tasks. An age-matched control group received no training. The complement syntax training was not effective in improving complement syntax competence more than in the other two groups. In contrast, the mental state training led to higher improvements in the mental state training group than in the other two groups on tasks assessing comprehension of the targeted concepts (e.g., comprehension of the seeing-knowing relation). The mental state training also had an effect on children's metacognitive awareness of their own ignorance which was, however, not independent of complement syntax competence assessed at 33 months. No effect was obtained on epistemic perspective-taking skills. Our findings indicate that the use of mental state language in discourse promotes children's acquisition of epistemic concepts even before their third birthday.

Adopted Utility Calculus: Origins of a Concept of Social Affiliation

To successfully navigate their social world, humans need to understand and map enduring relationships between people: Humans need a concept of social affiliation. Here I propose that the initial concept of social affiliation, available in infancy, is based on the extent to which one individual consistently takes on the goals and needs of another. This proposal grounds affiliation in intuitive psychology, as formalized in the naive-utility-calculus model. A concept of affiliation based on interpersonal utility adoption can account for findings from studies of infants' reasoning about imitation, similarity, helpful and fair individuals, "ritual" behaviors, and social groups without the need for additional innate mechanisms such as a coalitional psychology, moral sense, or general preference for similar others. I identify further tests of this proposal and also discuss how it is likely to be relevant to social reasoning and learning across the life span.

Knowledge in Sight: Toddlers Plan Efficient Epistemic Actions by Anticipating Learning Gains

Anticipating the learning consequences of actions is crucial to plan efficient information seeking. Such a capacity is needed for learners to determine which actions are most likely to result in learning. Here, we tested the early ontogeny of the human capacity to anticipate the amount of learning gained from seeing. In study 1, we tested infants' capacity to anticipate the availability of sight. Fourteen-month-old infants (N = 72) were invited to search for a toy hidden inside a container. The participants were faster to attempt at opening a shutter when this action allowed them to see inside the container. Moreover, this effect was specifically observed when seeing inside the container was potentially useful to the participants' goals. Thus, infants anticipated the availability of sight, and they calibrated their information-seeking behaviors accordingly. In studies 2 and 3, we tested toddlers' capacity to anticipate whether data would be cognitively useful for their goals. Two-and-a-half-year-olds (N = 72) had to locate a target character hidden among distractors. The participants flipped the characters more often, and were comparatively faster to initiate this action when it yielded access to visual data allowing them to locate the target. Thus, toddlers planned their information-seeking behaviors by anticipating the cognitive utility of sight. In contrast, toddlers did not calibrate their behaviors to the cognitive usefulness of auditory data. These results suggest that cognitive models of learning guide toddlers' search for information. The early developmental onset of the capacity to anticipate future learning gains is crucial for active learning.

How do we interpret questions? Simplified representations of knowledge guide humans' interpretation of information requests

This paper investigates the cognitive mechanisms supporting humans' interpretation of requests for information. Learners can only search for a piece of information if they know that they are ignorant about it. Thus, in principle, the interpretation of requests for information could be guided by representations of Socratic ignorance (tracking what people know that they do not know). Alternatively, the interpretation of requests for information could be simplified by relying primarily on simple knowledge tracking (i.e., merely tracking what people know). We judged these hypotheses by testing two-and-a-half-year-old toddlers (N = 18), five- to seven-year-old children (N = 72), and adults (N = 384). In our experiments, a speaker asked a question that could be disambiguated by tracking her state of knowledge. We manipulated the speakers' visuals to modulate the complexity of the ignorance representation required to disambiguate their questions. Toddlers showed no tendency to appeal to representations of Socratic ignorance when disambiguating questions (Pilot S1). Five- to seven-year-olds exhibited a similar pattern of results, and they performed better when information requests could be disambiguated using simple knowledge tracking (Studies 1a-1b). Adults used representations of Socratic ignorance to interpret questions, but were more confident when simple knowledge tracking was sufficient to disambiguate information requests (Studies 2-3). Moreover, adults disambiguated questions as if speakers could request information about things that they were ignorant of, even when speakers had no reason to know about their ignorance (Studies 3-4). Thus, the interpretation of requests for information rests primarily on simple knowledge tracking-and not on representations of Socratic ignorance-a heuristic that reduces processing costs.

Do knowledge representations facilitate learning under epistemic uncertainty?

Phillips and colleagues argue that knowledge representations are more fundamental than belief representations because they better facilitate social learning. We suggest that existing theory of mind paradigms may be ill-equipped to adequately evaluate this claim. Future study should explore learning in situations where there is uncertainty about one's own and others' knowledge, which better mirror real-world social learning contexts.

Inhibitory Control was needed in Level-1 Visual Perspective Taking: A Developing Negative Priming Study

Aim

Previous studies have found that both children and adults have difficulties in dealing with judgments in which self-perspective differs from other-perspective, even in level-1 perspective-taking. However, the underlying cognitive mechanism of this is still unclear. In the present study, we designed a negative priming (NP) paradigm of the dot-perspective task to examine whether inhibitory control was required to overcome egocentric bias in level-1 visual perspective-taking in children and adults. We observed an NP effect in both children (n= 43) and adults (n= 40). However, there was no significant difference between children and adults on the magnitude of the NP effect, indicating that when children could overcome the egocentric bias, they had inhibitory control ability comparable to that of adults in level-1 other-perspective-taking.

Background

Visual perspective-taking is an indispensable ability in social interaction; hence, it has attracted great attention from researchers. However, the mechanism underlying this process remains unclear. The present study aimed to investigate the role of inhibitory control in level-1 visual perspective-taking from a developmental perspective in order to understand the performance differences in perspective-taking tasks between children and adults.

Methods

The NP paradigm was applied to the dot-perspective task. Participants' response times (RTs) and error rates (ERs) were recorded during the experiment. A 2 (trial type: test vs control, within-subject) × 2 (age: children vs adults) mix-design ANOVA was used to analyse the RTs and ERs data separately.

Results

We observed an NP effect for both children (7.31, t (42) = 2.78, p < 0.01, Cohen's d = 0.22) and adults (27.58, t (39) = 2.31, p < 0.05, Cohen's d = 0.21). However, the difference in the magnitude of the NP effect between children and adults was not significant (t (81) = 0.54, p = 0.59).

Conclusion

Inhibitory control was needed to overcome egocentric bias in level-1 visual perspective-taking for both children and adults. Moreover, when children could overcome egocentric bias, they had an inhibitory control ability comparable to that of adults.

Can 5-month-old infants consider the perspective of a novel eyeless agent? New evidence for early mentalistic reasoning

Is early reasoning about an agent's knowledge best characterized by a mentalistic stance, a teleological stance, or both? In this research, 5-month-old infants (N = 64, 50% female, 83% White) saw a novel eyeless agent consistently approach object-A as opposed to object-B. Although infants could always see both objects, a screen separated object-B from the agent. When object-B protruded above the screen, infants interpreted the agent's actions as revealing a preference for object-A over object-B. When object-B did not protrude above the screen, however, infants refrained from attributing such a preference: Consistent with mentalistic accounts, they reasoned that the agent's representation of the scene did not include object-B, and they used the agent's incomplete representation, non-egocentrically, to interpret its actions.

Three-year-olds' Perspective-taking in Social Interactions: Relations with Socio-cognitive Skills

Understanding others’ perspectives and integrating this knowledge in social interactions is challenging for young children; even adults struggle with this skill. While young children show the capacity to understand what others can and cannot see under supportive laboratory conditions, more research is necessary to understand how children implement their perspective-taking (PT) skill during interactions and which socio-cognitive skills support their ability to do so. This preregistered study examined children’s Level 1 visual PT in a real-time social interaction and tested whether social-cognitive skills (focusing on inhibition of imitation) predicted PT. Thirty-six 3-year-old children (mean age: 37.3 months) participated in a PT task and responded implicitly (via eye gaze) and explicitly (via toy choice) to situations where their communicative partner could see some objects but not others. Three-year-olds demonstrated sensitivity to another’s perspective via implicit responses, but did not consistently take their partner’s perspective into account in their actions when considering objects their partner could not see. Contrary to adult findings, children who struggled to inhibit imitating (those more affected by another’s actions) demonstrated better PT, again when considering objects outside their partner’s sight. Thus, 3-year-olds’ sensitivity to others’ perspectives was robust, while acting on PT knowledge may still be developing; further, children more affected by another’s actions demonstrated improved PT skills.

Children acknowledge physical constraints less when actors behave stereotypically: Gender stereotypes as a case study

A fundamental part of understanding structural inequality is recognizing that constrained choices, particularly those that align with societal stereotypes, are poor indicators of a person's desires. This study examined whether children (N = 246 U.S. children, 53% female; 61% White, 24% Latinx; 5-10 years) acknowledge constraints in this way when reasoning about gender-stereotypical choices, relative to gender-neutral and gender-counterstereotypical choices. Results indicated that children more frequently inferred preferences regardless of whether the actor was constrained when reasoning about gender-stereotypical choices, as compared to gender-neutral or gender-counterstereotypical choices. We also found evidence of an age-related increase in the general tendency to acknowledge constraints. We discuss the broader implications of these results for children's understanding of constraints within society.

Five-month-old infants attribute inferences based on general knowledge to agents

To make sense of others' actions, we generally consider what information is available to them. This information may come from different sources, including perception and inference. Like adults, young infants track what information agents can obtain through perception: If an agent directly observes an event, for example, young infants expect the agent to have information about it. However, no investigation has yet examined whether young infants also track what information agents can obtain through inference, by bringing to bear relevant general knowledge. Building on the finding that by 4 months of age most infants have acquired the physical rule that wide objects can fit into wide containers but not narrow containers, we asked whether 5-month-olds would expect an agent who was searching for a wide toy hidden in her absence to reach for a wide box as opposed to a narrow box. Infants looked significantly longer when the agent selected the narrow box, suggesting that they expected her (a) to share the physical knowledge that wide objects can fit only into wide containers and (b) to infer that the wide toy must be hidden in the wide box. Three additional conditions supported this interpretation. Together, these results cast doubt on two-system accounts of early psychological reasoning, which claim that infants' early-developing system is too inflexible and encapsulated to integrate inputs from other cognitive processes, such as physical reasoning. Instead, the results support one-system accounts and provide new evidence that young infants' burgeoning psychological-reasoning system is qualitatively similar to that of older children and adults.

Macaque species with varying social tolerance show no differences in understanding what other agents perceive

A growing body of work demonstrates that a species' socioecology can impact its cognitive abilities. Indeed, even closely related species with different socioecological pressures often show different patterns of cognitive performance on the same task. Here, we explore whether major differences in social tolerance in two closely related macaque species can impact a core sociocognitive ability, the capacity to recognize what others see. Specifically, we compared the performance of Barbary macaques (Macaca sylvanus, n = 80) and rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta, n = 62) on a standard test of visual perspective understanding. In contrast to the difference in performance, one might expect from these species' divergent socioecologies that our results show similar performance across Barbary and rhesus macaques, with both species forming expectations about how another agent will act based on that agent's visual perspective. These results suggest that differences in socioecology may not play as big of a role in the evolution of some theory of mind capacities as they do in other decision-making or foraging contexts.

Do young rhesus macaques know what others see?: A comparative developmental perspective

Humans undergo robust ontogenetic shifts in the theory of mind capabilities. Are these developmental changes unique to human development or are they shared with other closely related non-human species? To explore this issue, we tested the development of the theory of mind capacities in a population of 236 infant and juvenile rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta). Using a looking-time method, we examined what developing monkeys know about others' perceptions. Specifically, we tested whether younger monkeys predict that a person will reach for an object where she last saw it. Overall, we found a significant interaction between a monkey's age and performance on this task (p = .014). Juvenile monkeys (between two and 5 years of age) show a nonsignificant trend towards human infant-like patterns of performance, looking longer during the unexpected condition as compared to the expected condition, though this difference is nonsignificant (p = .09). However, contrary to findings in human infants, infant rhesus macaques show a different trend. Infant monkeys on average look slightly longer on average during the expected condition than the unexpected condition, though this pattern was not significant (p = .06). Our developmental results in monkeys provide some hints about the development of the theory of mind capacities in non-humans. First, young rhesus macaques appear to show some interest in the perception of other agents. Second, young rhesus seems able to make predictions based on the visual perspective of another agent, though the developmental pattern of this ability is not as clear nor as robust as in humans. As such, though an understanding of others' perceptions is early-emerging in human infants, it may require more experience interacting with other social agents in our non-human relatives.

Knowledge before Belief

Research on the capacity to understand others' minds has tended to focus on representations of beliefs, which are widely taken to be among the most central and basic theory of mind representations. Representations of knowledge, by contrast, have received comparatively little attention and have often been understood as depending on prior representations of belief. After all, how could one represent someone as knowing something if one doesn't even represent them as believing it? Drawing on a wide range of methods across cognitive science, we ask whether belief or knowledge is the more basic kind of representation. The evidence indicates that non-human primates attribute knowledge but not belief, that knowledge representations arise earlier in human development than belief representations, that the capacity to represent knowledge may remain intact in patient populations even when belief representation is disrupted, that knowledge (but not belief) attributions are likely automatic, and that explicit knowledge attributions are made more quickly than equivalent belief attributions. Critically, the theory of mind representations uncovered by these various methods exhibit a set of signature features clearly indicative of knowledge: they are not modality-specific, they are factive, they are not just true belief, and they allow for representations of egocentric ignorance. We argue that these signature features elucidate the primary function of knowledge representation: facilitating learning from others about the external world. This suggests a new way of understanding theory of mind-one that is focused on understanding others' minds in relation to the actual world, rather than independent from it.

Children's understanding of when a person's confidence and hesitancy is a cue to their credibility

The most readily-observable and influential cue to one's credibility is their confidence. Although one's confidence correlates with knowledge, one should not always trust confident sources or disregard hesitant ones. Three experiments (N = 662; 3- to 12-year-olds) examined the developmental trajectory of children's understanding of 'calibration': whether a person's confidence or hesitancy correlates with their knowledge. Experiments 1 and 2 provide evidence that children use a person's history of calibration to guide their learning. Experiments 2 and 3 revealed a developmental progression in calibration understanding: Children preferred a well-calibrated over a miscalibrated confident person by around 4 years, whereas even 7- to 8-year-olds were insensitive to calibration in hesitant people. The widespread implications for social learning, impression formation, and social cognition are discussed.

The role of the motor system in action understanding and communication: Evidence from human infants and non-human primates

There is growing evidence that activation of the motor system during observation of actions, a phenomenon first observed in non-human primates, underlies action understanding and even communication. This review (a) examines the evidence on motor system activity as an underlying neural correlate of action understanding; (b) reviews the theoretical and empirical work linking action understanding and the development of communication, with a specific focus on the role that gestures play as an intermediary; and (c) discusses the research on and existing opportunities for understanding the link between the motor system and communication in both humans and non-human primates, through the lens of action perception. Bringing together findings and perspectives from developmental social cognition in both humans and non-human primates and applying recent neuroscientific perspectives will help to elucidate the processes underlying the ability to understand and communicate with others.

The cognitive demands of remembering a speaker's perspective and managing common ground size modulate 8- and 10-year-olds' perspective-taking abilities

Using "theory of mind" to successfully accommodate differing perspectives during communication requires much more than just acquiring basic theory of mind understanding. Evidence suggests that children's ability to adopt a speaker's perspective continues to develop throughout childhood to adolescence until adulthood. The current study examined the cognitive factors that could account for variations in children's abilities to use a speaker's perspective during language comprehension and whether the same factors contribute to age-related improvements. Our study incorporated into a commonly used communication task two types of memory demands that are frequently present in our everyday communication but have been overlooked in the previous literature: remembering a speaker's perspective and the amount of common ground information. Findings from two experiments demonstrated that both 8- and 10-year-olds committed more egocentric errors when each of these memory demands was high. Our study also found some supporting evidence for the age-related improvement in children's perspective use, with 10-year-olds generally committing fewer egocentric errors compared with 8-year-olds. Interestingly, there was no clear evidence that the memory factors that affected children's perspective use in our experiments were also the factors that drove age-related improvement.

The choice is yours: Infants' expectations about an agent's future behavior based on taking and receiving actions

Our social world is rich with information about other people's choices, which subsequently inform our inferences about their future behavior. For individuals socialized within the American cultural context, which places a high value on autonomy and independence, outcomes that are the result of an agent's own choices may hold more predictive value than similar outcomes that are the result of another person's choices. Across two experiments we test the ontogeny of this phenomenon; that is, whether infants are sensitive to the causal history associated with an agent's acquisition of an object. We demonstrate that on average, 12.5-month-old American infants view taking actions as a better indication of an agent's future behavior than are receiving actions. Furthermore, there were significant individual differences in the extent to which infants perceived object receipt to be indicative of future behavior. Specifically, the less autonomous infants were perceived to be (by their parents), socialized to be, and behaved, the more they viewed object receipt as indicative of future behavior. The results are discussed in terms of the role of individual and cultural experience in early understanding of intentional action. (PsycINFO Database Record

How do 3-month-old infants attribute preferences to a human agent?

The current study showed that 3-month-old infants attributed a preference to a human agent, with her face and upper body visible, when she consistently reached for and grasped one of two objects with her bare hand. In contrast, infants did not appear to interpret the agent's same actions of grasping the object as indicative of her preference when it was the only object present or when it hid the other object from her but not from the infants. These results suggest that even from an early age, infants interpret human agents' actions in terms of mental states such as goals and preferences. In light of the current results, mechanisms for early psychological understanding are discussed.

Functional Organization of the Temporal-Parietal Junction for Theory of Mind in Preverbal Infants: A Near-Infrared Spectroscopy Study

Successful human social life requires imagining what others believe or think to understand and predict behavior. This ability, often referred to as theory of mind (ToM), reliably engages a specialized network of temporal and prefrontal brain regions in older children and adults, including selective recruitment of the temporal-parietal junction (TPJ). To date, how and when this specialized brain organization for ToM arises is unknown due to limitations in functional neuroimaging at younger ages. Here, we used the emerging technique of functional near-infrared spectroscopy to measure the functional brain response across parietal, temporal, and prefrontal regions in 7-month-old male and female infants as they viewed different video scenarios of a person searching for a hidden object. Over different conditions, we manipulated whether the person held an accurate (true) or inaccurate (false) belief about the location of the hidden object in the videos. In two separate experiments, we observed that activity from the TPJ, but not other temporal and prefrontal regions, spontaneously tracked with the beliefs of the other person, responding more during scenarios when the other person's belief regarding the location of the object was false compared with scenarios when her belief was true. These results mirror those obtained with adults to show that the TPJ already shows some functional organization relevant to high-level social cognition by around 7 months of age. Furthermore, these results suggest that infants may draw on similar core mechanisms to implicitly track beliefs, as adults do when reasoning explicitly about them.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Humans selectively engage a network of brain regions, including the temporal-parietal junction (TPJ), to track what others think, an ability referred to as theory of mind. How and when this specialized brain organization for high-level social cognition arises is unknown. Using the emerging technique of near-infrared spectroscopy with 7-month-old infants, we observed that activity of the TPJ, but not other temporal and frontal regions, distinguished between scenarios when another person's belief about the location of the object was false compared with scenarios when the belief was true. These results suggest that a basic neural architecture to understand and predict the actions of others based on their beliefs may be present from the first year of life.

Infants' understanding of the definite/indefinite article in a third-party communicative situation

The present study examines how infants use their emergent perspective-taking and language comprehension abilities to make sense of interactions between two human agents. In the study, one agent (Agent1) could see only one of two identical balls on an apparatus because of a screen obstructing her view while the infant and another agent (Agent2) could see both balls. 19-month-old English-learning monolingual infants seemed to expect Agent2 to grasp the ball visible to Agent1 when she said to Agent2 "Give me the ball" but not when she said "Give me a ball." 14-month-olds appeared to accept that Agent2 could grasp either ball when Agent1 said "Give me the ball." Therefore, by 19 months of age, English-learning infants seem to attend to the specific linguistic units used, e.g., the definite article, to identify the referent of others' speech. Possible reasons in connection with language acquisition processes and/or environmental factors for the two age groups' respective failures with the definite and the indefinite articles are discussed.

The Pertinence of Studying Neuroethology in Nonhuman Primates for Human Behavior in Groups and Organizations

Are we the only living beings endowed with a complex communicative system and sharp sociocognitive skills? How did these remarkable abilities develop? Even raised several centuries ago, those questions are still nourishing the current research and debates. A relevant approach for identifying the dynamics in the evolution of humans’ social and communicative abilities appears to study our closest living relatives, the nonhuman primates. In this article I focus on two abilities that drove the building of our unique sociality and are still playing a crucial role in daily human behaviors in groups and organizations: (a) the origins of human language, through the study of nonhuman primates gestures, vocalizations, and facial expressions and (b) the precursors and underpinning neural mechanisms of our ability to assess others’ mental states, that is, theory of mind. In each part, examples illustrate the advantages and limitations of the different methodological approaches used in research on nonhuman primates’ communication and social abilities and discuss the results in light of the current hypotheses and still open debates on what make the singularity of our species.

Visible Social Interactions Do Not Support the Development of False Belief Understanding in the Absence of Linguistic Input: Evidence from Deaf Adult Homesigners

Congenitally deaf individuals exhibit enhanced visuospatial abilities relative to normally hearing individuals. An early example is the increased sensitivity of deaf signers to stimuli in the visual periphery (Neville and Lawson, 1987a). While these enhancements are robust and extend across a number of visual and spatial skills, they seem not to extend to other domains which could potentially build on these enhancements. For example, congenitally deaf children, in the absence of adequate language exposure and acquisition, do not develop typical social cognition skills as measured by traditional Theory of Mind tasks. These delays/deficits occur despite their presumed lifetime use of visuo-perceptual abilities to infer the intentions and behaviors of others (e.g., Pyers and Senghas, 2009; O’Reilly et al., 2014). In a series of studies, we explore the limits on the plasticity of visually based socio-cognitive abilities, from perspective taking to Theory of Mind/False Belief, in rarely studied individuals: deaf adults who have not acquired a conventional language (Homesigners). We compared Homesigners’ performance to that of two other understudied groups in the same culture: Deaf signers of an emerging language (Cohort 1 of Nicaraguan Sign Language), and hearing speakers of Spanish with minimal schooling. We found that homesigners performed equivalently to both comparison groups with respect to several visual socio-cognitive abilities: Perspective Taking (Levels 1 and 2), adapted from Masangkay et al. (1974), and the False Photograph task, adapted from Leslie and Thaiss (1992). However, a lifetime of visuo-perceptual experiences (observing the behavior and interactions of others) did not support success on False Belief tasks, even when linguistic demands were minimized. Participants in the comparison groups outperformed the Homesigners, but did not universally pass the False Belief tasks. Our results suggest that while some of the social development achievements of young typically developing children may be dissociable from their linguistic experiences, language and/or educational experiences clearly scaffolds the transition into False Belief understanding. The lack of experience using a shared language cannot be overcome, even with the benefit of many years of observing others’ behaviors and the potential neural reorganization and visuospatial enhancements resulting from deafness.

Once a frog-lover, always a frog-lover?: Infants' goal generalization is influenced by the nature of accompanying speech

The ability to interpret choices as enduring preferences that generalize beyond the immediate situation gives adults a powerful means of predicting and explaining others' behavior. How do infants come to recognize that current choices can be driven by generalizable preferences? Although infants can encode others' actions in terms of goals (Woodward, 1998), there is evidence that 10-month-olds still fail to generalize goal information presented in one environment to an event sequence occurring in a new environment (Sommerville & Crane, 2009). Are there some circumstances in which infants interpret others' goals as generalizable across environments? We investigate whether the vocalizations a person produces while selecting an object in one room influences infants' generalization of the goal to a new room. Ten-month-olds did not spontaneously generalize the actor's goal, but did generalize the actor's goal when the actor initially accompanied her object selection with a statement of preference. Infants' generalization was not driven by the attention-grabbing features of the statement or the mere use of language, as they did not generalize when the actor used matched nonspeech vocalizations or sung speech. Infants interpreted the goal as person-specific, as they did not generalize the choice to a new actor. We suggest that the referential specificity of accompanying speech vocalizations influences infants' tendency to interpret a choice as personal rather than situational. (PsycINFO Database Record

Aproximación Neurodinámica a la Cognición Social

En las últimas décadas ha crecido el estudio los mecanismos involucrados en el comportamiento social, gran parte de estas indagaciones se han realizado desde una aproximación de la neurociencia social cognitiva, la cual se basa en un modelo representacional del procesamiento de información. No obstante, esta aproximación ha sido ampliamente criticada por desconocer la participación del cuerpo, la dinámica afectiva, el contexto social, el cambio durante el desarrollo y suponer un procesamiento modular endógeno. En este sentido, este artículo presenta un modelo neurodinámico de la cognición social, comprendiéndola desde una aproximación enactiva, situada, relacional y sistémica. Desde este modelo se describen los principales cambios en esperados la actividad cerebral durante las interacciones sociales en tiempo real y durante la ontogenia. Se concluye resaltando los desafíos y oportunidades que este tipo de aproximaciones puede proporcionar a la neurociencia y psicología social del futuro.

Words are not enough: how preschoolers' integration of perspective and emotion informs their referential understanding

When linguistic information alone does not clarify a speaker's intended meaning, skilled communicators can draw on a variety of cues to infer communicative intent. In this paper, we review research examining the developmental emergence of preschoolers' sensitivity to a communicative partner's perspective. We focus particularly on preschoolers' tendency to use cues both within the communicative context (i.e. a speaker's visual access to information) and within the speech signal itself (i.e. emotional prosody) to make on-line inferences about communicative intent. Our review demonstrates that preschoolers' ability to use visual and emotional cues of perspective to guide language interpretation is not uniform across tasks, is sometimes related to theory of mind and executive function skills, and, at certain points of development, is only revealed by implicit measures of language processing.

Systematic Comparison of Brain Imaging Meta-Analyses of ToM with vPT

In visual perspective taking (vPT) one has to concern oneself with what other people see and how they see it. Since seeing is a mental state, developmental studies have discussed vPT within the domain of “theory of mind (ToM)” but imaging studies have not treated it as such. Based on earlier results from several meta-analyses, we tested for the overlap of visual perspective taking studies with 6 different kinds of ToM studies: false belief, trait judgments, strategic games, social animations, mind in the eyes, and rational actions. Joint activation was observed between the vPT task and some kinds of ToM tasks in regions involving the left temporoparietal junction (TPJ), anterior precuneus, left middle occipital gyrus/extrastriate body area (EBA), and the left inferior frontal and precentral gyrus. Importantly, no overlap activation was found for the vPT tasks with the joint core of all six kinds of ToM tasks. This raises the important question of what the common denominator of all tasks that fall under the label of “theory of mind” is supposed to be if visual perspective taking is not one of them.

Expectancy violations promote learning in young children

Children, including infants, have expectations about the world around them, and produce reliable responses when these expectations are violated. However, little is known about how such expectancy violations affect subsequent cognition. Here we tested the hypothesis that violations of expectation enhance children's learning. In four experiments we compared 3- to 6-year-old children's ability to learn novel words in situations that defied versus accorded with their core knowledge of object behavior. In Experiments 1 and 2 we taught children novel words following one of two types of events. One event violated expectations about the spatiotemporal or featural properties of objects (e.g., an object appeared to magically change locations). The other event was almost identical, but did not violate expectations (e.g., an object was visibly moved from one location to another). In both experiments we found that children robustly learned when taught after the surprising event, but not following the expected event. In Experiment 3 we ruled out two alternative explanations for our results. Finally, in Experiment 4, we asked whether surprise affects children's learning in a targeted or a diffuse way. We found that surprise only enhanced children's learning about the entity that had behaved surprisingly, and not about unrelated objects. Together, these experiments show that core knowledge - and violations of expectations generated by core knowledge - shapes new learning.