Do 10-month-old infants understand others' false beliefs?

Neural sensitivity to others' belief states in infancy predicts later theory of mind reasoning in childhood

While pre-verbal infants may be sensitive to others' mental states, they are not able to accurately answer questions about them until several years later, an ability referred to as having a theory of mind. Here we ask whether infant social-cognitive sensitivity is subserved by the same brain mechanisms as those that support theory of mind in childhood. To do so, we explored the relationship between functional sensitivity of the right temporal-parietal junction to mental state processing in infancy, a region known to underlie theory of mind in older children, and explicit theory of mind reasoning in the same group several years later. In a small initial sample (N = 33), we find evidence of a longitudinal brain-behavioral link from infancy to childhood, providing preliminary support for a common mechanism for theory of mind across development. However, the brain metric that was predictive of individual differences was not the response to conditions that required tracking the beliefs, but instead, the response to a control condition where belief tracking was not obligatory to predict others' behavior. In hindsight, the ambiguity of this control condition may have best distinguished between infants who had different propensities to engage in belief tracking, suggesting a potential role for active experience in infancy contributing to individual differences in later theory of mind development in childhood. Given the exploratory nature of the study, other alternative explanations for these results must also be considered.

Continuity in false belief understanding from 33 to 52 months of age

Conceptual continuity in children's false belief understanding from toddlerhood to childhood was investigated in a longitudinal study of 75 children. Performance in a low-demands false belief task at 33 months of age was significantly correlated with performance in a content false belief task at 52 months independent of language ability and executive function. In contrast, there was no correlation with performance in a location false belief task, which differed from the "Sally-Anne" format of the low-demands task and was high in executive demands. These findings support the view that explicit false belief understanding may be continuous from toddlerhood to childhood and that developmental change may be characterized in terms of enrichment and increasing stability of core conceptual understanding rather than in terms of fundamental change.

Spontaneous attribution of underspecified belief of social partners facilitates processing shared information

The main question of Theory of Mind research is not only how we represent others' mental states, but also how these representations influence our first-person interaction with our surrounding environment. A novel theory of belief files proposes that we should think about belief tracking as an online, spontaneous, and effortless mechanism giving rise to structured representations, thus easing the use of beliefs in behavior selection. Beliefs are formed by two different sub mechanisms: (1) opening an empty placeholder belief file, for a particular intentional agent, and (2) filling it up with mental content attributed to the agent. This theory opens the possibility of exploiting theory of mind abilities even in situations when we can attribute only underspecified mental contents to others. The goal of the present study was to provide a proof of concept test: whether spontaneous belief tracking starts effortlessly even when we do not know a partner's actual belief content. We created an object detection paradigm, where the visual access of a virtual agent to the object to be detected by the participant was manipulated. The agent getting access to the information for processing always preceded the participant getting access to it, resulting in the need of attributing belief without specified content in it. Our results have shown that participants detected the object with a reduced reaction time when the observed agent had visual access to the object's expected place compared to when the participant watched the same scenario, but the object's location remained occluded for the observed agent and thus was revealed only for the participant. This suggests that the information processing of humans speeds up when another agent has access to a piece of information as well. Thus, we do track agents' potential beliefs without knowing its actual content. This study contributes to our understanding of the effect of spontaneous computation of others' mental states on first-person information processing.

The prefrontal cortex and (uniquely) human cooperation: a comparative perspective

Humans have an exceptional ability to cooperate relative to many other species. We review the neural mechanisms supporting human cooperation, focusing on the prefrontal cortex. One key feature of human social life is the prevalence of cooperative norms that guide social behavior and prescribe punishment for noncompliance. Taking a comparative approach, we consider shared and unique aspects of cooperative behaviors in humans relative to nonhuman primates, as well as divergences in brain structure that might support uniquely human aspects of cooperation. We highlight a medial prefrontal network common to nonhuman primates and humans supporting a foundational process in cooperative decision-making: valuing outcomes for oneself and others. This medial prefrontal network interacts with lateral prefrontal areas that are thought to represent cooperative norms and modulate value representations to guide behavior appropriate to the local social context. Finally, we propose that more recently evolved anterior regions of prefrontal cortex play a role in arbitrating between cooperative norms across social contexts, and suggest how future research might fruitfully examine the neural basis of norm arbitration.

Do "knowledge attributions" involve metarepresentation just like belief attributions do?

The authors distinguish knowledge and belief attributions, emphasizing the role of the former in mental-state attribution. This does not, however, warrant diminishing interest in the latter. Knowledge attributions may not entail mental-state attributions or metarepresentations. Even if they do, the proposed features are insufficient to distinguish them from belief attributions, demanding that we first understand each underlying representation.

The Developmental Differences of Implicit Theory of Mind in Infants Using Anticipatory Looking Paradigm

Objectives: This study examined the developmental differences of implicit theory of mind in infants aged 12 to 24 months according to two types of tasks within the anticipatory looking paradigm, as well as the interaction between age group and type of task.Methods: In all, 69 infants participated in this study aged 12, 18, and 24 months. Two types of implicit false-belief tasks using an anticipatory looking paradigm were administered to all the infants for about 4 minutes 20 seconds. While all of the infants watched two types of computerized video clips (FB1, FB2) through the computer screen, an eye-tracker (TobiiX120) recorded the traces of anticipatory looking of infants. The anticipatory looking of infants in test trials was then analyzed.Results: Results showed that the differences between the 12-month-olds and the other age groups (18-month-olds, 24-month-olds) were significant, but even some of the 12-month-olds showed evidence of an implicit theory of mind. The level of implicit theory of mind of 18-month infants did not significantly differ from that of 24-month infants. In addition, a difference by type of implicit false-belief task was significant. Infants showed a higher level of implicit theory of mind in Task1 (FB1) than in Task2 (FB2). However, the interaction effect between age and type of task was not significant.Conclusion: The findings of this study hold implications for the development of implicit theory of mind early in life, and indicate the validity of the anticipatory looking paradigm with two types of tasks. Several limitations and suggestions for future study are also presented.

Are the classic false belief tasks cursed? Young children are just as likely as older children to pass a false belief task when they are not required to overcome the curse of knowledge

The question of when children understand that others have minds that can represent or misrepresent reality (i.e., possess a 'Theory of Mind') is hotly debated. This understanding plays a fundamental role in social interaction (e.g., interpreting human behavior, communicating, empathizing). Most research on this topic has relied on false belief tasks such as the 'Sally-Anne Task', because researchers have argued that it is the strongest litmus test examining one's understanding that the mind can misrepresent reality. Unfortunately, in addition to a variety of other cognitive demands this widely used measure also unnecessarily involves overcoming a bias that is especially pronounced in young children-the 'curse of knowledge' (the tendency to be biased by one's knowledge when considering less-informed perspectives). Three- to 6-year-old's (n = 230) false belief reasoning was examined across tasks that either did, or did not, require overcoming the curse of knowledge, revealing that when the curse of knowledge was removed three-year-olds were significantly better at inferring false beliefs, and as accurate as five- and six-year-olds. These findings reveal that the classic task is not specifically measuring false belief understanding. Instead, previously observed developmental changes in children's performance could be attributed to the ability to overcome the curse of knowledge. Similarly, previously observed relationships between individual differences in false belief reasoning and a variety of social outcomes could instead be the result of individual differences in the ability to overcome the curse of knowledge, highlighting the need to re-evaluate how best to interpret large bodies of research on false belief reasoning and social-emotional functioning.

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.

Infants' performance in the indirect false belief tasks: A second-person interpretation

Research in the last 15 years has challenged the idea that false belief attribution develops at 4 years of age. Studies with indirect false belief tasks contend to provide evidence of false belief attribution in the second year of life. We review the literature on indirect false belief tasks carried out in infants using looking and active helping paradigms. Although the results are heterogeneous and not conclusive, such tasks appear to capture a real effect. However, it is misleading to call them “false belief” tasks, as it is possible to pass them without making any false belief attribution. Infants need to keep track of the object's and agent's positions, trajectories, and focus of attention, given an intentional understanding of the agent, to pass these new tasks. We, therefore, argue that the evidence can be better explained in terms of second‐person attributions, which are transparent, extensional, nonpropositional, reciprocally contingent, and implicit. Second‐person attributions can also account for primates' mentalizing abilities, as revealed by similar indirect tasks.

This article is categorized under:

Cognitive Biology > Cognitive Development

Philosophy > Foundations of Cognitive Science

Cognitive Biology > Evolutionary Roots of Cognition

Infants recruit logic to learn about the social world

When perceptually available information is scant, we can leverage logical connections among hypotheses to draw reliable conclusions that guide our reasoning and learning. We investigate whether this function of logical reasoning is present in infancy and aid understanding and learning about the social environment. In our task, infants watch reaching actions directed toward a hidden object whose identity is ambiguous between two alternatives and has to be inferred by elimination. Here we show that infants apply a disjunctive inference to identify the hidden object and use this logical conclusion to assess the consistency of the actions with a preference previously demonstrated by the agent and, importantly, also to acquire new knowledge regarding the preferences of the observed actor. These findings suggest that, early in life, preverbal logical reasoning functions as a reliable source of evidence that can support learning by offering a logical route for knowledge acquisition.

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.

On the domain specificity of the mechanisms underpinning spontaneous anticipatory looks in false-belief tasks

Many studies proposed that infants' and adults' looking behavior suggest a spontaneous and implicit ability to reason about others' beliefs. It has been argued, however, that these successes are false positives due to domain-general processes, such as retroactive interference. In this study, we investigated the domain specificity of mechanisms underpinning participants' looking behavior by manipulating the dynamic cues in the event stimuli. Infants aged 15 and 20 months and adults saw animation events in which either a self-moving triangle, or a hand holding an identical inert triangle, chased an animated disk. Most 20-month-olds and adults showed belief congruent anticipatory looks in the agent-triangle condition, whereas they showed no bias in the inert triangle control condition. These results are not consistent with submentalizing accounts based on domain-general low-level processes and provide further support for domain-specific explanations positing an early-emerging mentalistic reasoning.

Fourteen- to Eighteen-Month-Old Infants Use Explicit Linguistic Information to Update an Agent's False Belief

The current research examined how infants exploit linguistic information to update an agent's false belief about an object's location. Fourteen- to eighteen-month-old infants first watched a series of events involving two agents, a ball, and two containers (a box and a cup). Agent1 repeatedly acted on the ball and then put it in the box in the presence of agent2. Then agent1 disappeared from the scene and agent2 switched the ball's location from the box to the cup. Upon agent1's return, agent2 told her, "The ball is in the cup!" Agent1 then reached for either the cup (cup event) or the box (box event). The infants looked reliably longer if shown the box event as opposed to the cup event. However, when agent2 simply said, "The ball and the cup!" - which does not explicitly mention the ball's new location - infants looked significantly longer if shown the cup event as opposed the box event. These findings thus provide new evidence for false-belief understanding in infancy and suggest that infants expect an agent's false belief to be updated only by explicit verbal information.

Infants attribute false beliefs to a toy crane

The mentalistic view of early theory of mind posits that infants possess a robust and sophisticated understanding of false belief that is masked by the demands of traditional explicit tasks. Much of the evidence supporting this mentalistic view comes from infants' looking time at events that violate their expectations about the beliefs of a human agent. We conducted a replication of the violation-of-expectation procedure, except that the human agent was replaced by an inanimate agent. Infants watched a toy crane repeatedly move toward a box containing an object. In the absence of the crane, the object changed location. When the crane returned, 16-month-old infants looked longer when it turned toward the object's new location, consistent with the attribution of a false belief to the crane. These results suggest that infants spontaneously attribute false beliefs to inanimate agents. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at https://youtu.be/qqEPPhd9FDo.

Developmental progression of mental state understandings in infancy

This study establishes a sequence of developing mental state understandings in infants. We used three violation-of-expectation paradigms to assess fifty-seven 16-month-olds’ ability to (a) infer an actress’s intention from her prior repeated approaches to an object, (b) recognize her emotion by watching her facial-emotional display, and (c) deduce her false belief by noticing her lack of visual access to a change in the experimental setup. Contingencies between passing the three tasks were analyzed. Results showed that the infants made sense of intention first, followed by emotion, and then false belief. This progressive sequence parallels what has been found with preschoolers using verbal theory-of-mind tasks.

Six-Month-Old Infants Predict Agents' Goal-Directed Actions on Occluded Objects

Infants can infer agents' goals after observing agents' goal-directed actions on objects and can subsequently make predictions about how agents will act on objects in the future. We investigated the representations supporting these predictions. We familiarized 6-month-old infants to an agent who preferentially reached for one of two featurally distinct objects following a cue. At test, the objects were sequentially occluded from the infant in the agent's presence. We asked whether infants could generate action predictions without visual access to the relevant objects by measuring whether infants shifted their gaze to the location of the agent's hidden goal object following the cue. We also examined what infants represented about the hidden objects by removing one of the occluders to reveal either the original hidden object or the unexpected other object and measuring infants' looking time. We found that, even without visual access to the objects, infants made predictive gazes to the location of the agent's occluded goal object, but failed to represent the features of either hidden object. These results suggest that infants make goal-based action predictions when the relevant objects in the scene are occluded, but doing so may come at the expense of maintaining representations of the objects.

The relationship between parental mental-state language and 2.5-year-olds' performance on a nontraditional false-belief task

A growing body of evidence suggests that children succeed in nontraditional false-belief tasks in the first years of life. However, few studies have examined individual differences in infants' and toddlers' performance on these tasks. Here we investigated whether parental use of mental-state language (i.e. think, understand), which predicts children's performance on elicited-response false-belief tasks at older ages, also predicts toddlers' performance on a nontraditional task. We tested 2.5-year-old children in a verbal nontraditional false-belief task that included two looking time measures, anticipatory looking and preferential looking, and measured parents' use of mental-state language during a picture-book task. Parents' use of mental-state language positively predicted children's performance on the anticipatory-looking measure of the nontraditional task. These results provide the first evidence that social factors relate to children's false-belief understanding prior to age 3 and that this association extends to performance on nontraditional tasks. These findings add to a growing number of studies suggesting that mental-state language supports mental-state understanding across the lifespan.

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.

The Developmental Origins of False-Belief Understanding

Understanding that individuals can be mistaken, or hold false beliefs, about the world is an important human ability that plays a vital role in social interactions. When and how does this ability develop? Traditional investigations using elicited-response tasks suggested that false-belief understanding did not emerge until at least age 4. However, more recent studies have shown that children demonstrate false-belief understanding much earlier when tested via other means. In the present article, I summarize recent evidence that a robust, flexible understanding of false belief emerges in infancy and discuss why older children fail elicited-response tasks despite their ability to represent beliefs.

Surprise! 20-month-old infants understand the emotional consequences of false beliefs

Recent studies suggest that by the second year of life, infants can attribute false beliefs to agents. However, prior studies have largely focused on infants' ability to predict a mistaken agent's physical actions on objects. The present research investigated whether 20-month-old infants could also reason about belief-based emotional displays. In Experiments 1 and 2, infants viewed an agent who shook two objects: one rattled and the other was silent. Infants expected the agent to express surprise at the silent object if she had a false belief that both objects rattled, but not if she was merely ignorant about the objects' properties. Experiment 3 replicated and extended these findings: if an agent falsely believed that two containers held toy bears (when only one did so), infants expected the agent to express surprise at the empty, but not the full, container. Together, these results provide the first evidence that infants in the second year of life understand the causal relationship between beliefs and emotional displays. These findings thus provide new evidence for false-belief understanding in infancy and suggest that infants, like older children, possess a robust understanding of belief that applies to a broad range of belief-based responses.

Rethinking the Relationship between Social Experience and False-Belief Understanding: A Mentalistic Account

It was long assumed that the capacity to represent false beliefs did not emerge until at least age four, as evidenced by children's performance on elicited-response tasks. However, recent evidence that infants appear to demonstrate false-belief understanding when tested with alternative, non-elicited-response measures has led some researchers to conclude that the capacity to represent beliefs emerges in the 1st year of life. This mentalistic view has been criticized for failing to offer an explanation for the well-established positive associations between social factors and preschoolers' performance on elicited-response false-belief tasks. In this paper, we address this criticism by offering an account that reconciles these associations with the mentalistic claim that false-belief understanding emerges in infancy. We propose that rather than facilitating the emergence of the capacity to represent beliefs, social factors facilitate the use of this ability via effects on attention, inference, retrieval, and response production. Our account predicts that the relationship between social factors and false-belief understanding should not be specific to preschoolers' performance in elicited-response tasks: this relationship should be apparent across the lifespan in a variety of paradigms. We review an accumulating body of evidence that supports this prediction.

Playing with Expectations: A Contextual View of Humor Development

In the developmental literature, the idea has been proposed that young children do not understand the specificity of non-literal communicative acts. In this article, I focus on young children's ability to produce and understand different forms of humor. I explore the acquisition of the communicative contexts that enable children to engage in humorous interactions before they possess the capacity to analyze them in the terms afforded by a full-fledged theory of mind. I suggest that different forms of humor share several basic features and that we can construct a continuum from simple to sophisticated forms. In particular, I focus on teasing, a form of humor already present in preverbal infants that is also considered a typical feature of irony. I argue that all forms of humor can be regarded as a type of interaction that I propose to call "playing with expectations."

Moral Learning: Conceptual foundations and normative relevance

What is distinctive about a bringing a learning perspective to moral psychology? Part of the answer lies in the remarkable transformations that have taken place in learning theory over the past two decades, which have revealed how powerful experience-based learning can be in the acquisition of abstract causal and evaluative representations, including generative models capable of attuning perception, cognition, affect, and action to the physical and social environment. When conjoined with developments in neuroscience, these advances in learning theory permit a rethinking of fundamental questions about the acquisition of moral understanding and its role in the guidance of behavior. For example, recent research indicates that spatial learning and navigation involve the formation of non-perspectival as well as ego-centric models of the physical environment, and that spatial representations are combined with learned information about risk and reward to guide choice and potentiate further learning. Research on infants provides evidence that they form non-perspectival expected-value representations of agents and actions as well, which help them to navigate the human environment. Such representations can be formed by highly-general mental processes such as causal and empathic simulation, and thus afford a foundation for spontaneous moral learning and action that requires no innate moral faculty and can exhibit substantial autonomy with respect to community norms. If moral learning is indeed integral with the acquisition and updating of casual and evaluative models, this affords a new way of understanding well-known but seemingly puzzling patterns in intuitive moral judgment-including the notorious "trolley problems."

Young children infer preferences from a single action, but not if it is constrained

Inferring others' preferences is socially important and useful. We investigated whether children infer preferences from the minimal information provided by an agent's single action, and whether they avoid inferring preference when the action is constrained. In three experiments, children saw vignettes in which an agent took a worse toy instead of a better one. Experiment 1 shows that this single action influences how young children infer preferences. Children aged three and four were more likely to infer the agent preferred the worse toy when the agent took this toy, compared with when the agent did not take either toy. Experiment 2 then shows that children consider constraints when inferring preferences from a single action. From age 5, children were less likely to avoid inferring a preference for the worse toy when the agent's action was physically constrained. Finally, Experiment 3 provides evidence that children's and adults' sensitivity to constraints, when inferring preferences, is not based on a general notion of constraints, and instead depends on several specific notions. Whereas 5-6-year-olds in this experiment considered physical and socio-moral constraints when inferring preferences, they had difficulty grasping the relevance of epistemic constraints. Adults considered physical and epistemic constraints, but were not influenced by the socio-moral constraint of ownership. Together these findings contribute to a picture of cognitive development in which children are able to infer non-obvious properties on the basis of minimal concrete information, and are also sensitive to subtle changes in this information.

What Cognitive Representations Support Primate Theory of Mind?

Much recent work has examined the evolutionary origins of human mental state representations. This work has yielded strikingly consistent results: primates show a sophisticated ability to track the current and past perceptions of others, but they fail to represent the beliefs of others. We offer a new account of the nuanced performance of primates in theory of mind (ToM) tasks. We argue that primates form awareness relations tracking the aspects of reality that other agents are aware of. We contend that these awareness relations allow primates to make accurate predictions in social situations, but that this capacity falls short of our human-like representational ToM. We end by explaining how this new account makes important new empirical predictions about primate ToM.

A developmental perspective on the neural bases of human empathy

While empathy has been widely studied in philosophical and psychological literatures, recent advances in social neuroscience have shed light on the neural correlates of this complex interpersonal phenomenon. In this review, we provide an overview of brain imaging studies that have investigated the neural substrates of human empathy. Based on existing models of the functional architecture of empathy, we review evidence of the neural underpinnings of each main component, as well as their development from infancy. Although early precursors of affective sharing and self-other distinction appear to be present from birth, recent findings also suggest that even higher-order components of empathy such as perspective-taking and emotion regulation demonstrate signs of development during infancy. This merging of developmental and social neuroscience literature thus supports the view that ontogenic development of empathy is rooted in early infancy, well before the emergence of verbal abilities. With age, the refinement of top-down mechanisms may foster more appropriate empathic responses, thus promoting greater altruistic motivation and prosocial behaviors.

Explaining the U-Shaped Development of Intent-Based Moral Judgments

When preschoolers evaluate actions and agents, they typically neglect agents' intentions and focus on action outcomes instead. By contrast, intentions count much more than outcomes for older children and adults. This phenomenon has traditionally been seen as evidence of a developmental change in children's concept of what is morally good and bad. However, a growing number of studies shows that infants are able to reason about agents' intentions and take them into account in their spontaneous socio-moral evaluations. Here we argue that this puzzling U-shaped trajectory in children's judgments is best accounted for by a model that posits developmental continuity in moral competence and emphasizes the effect of immature executive function skills on preschoolers' performance.

Processing Demands Impact 3-Year-Olds' Performance in a Spontaneous-Response Task: New Evidence for the Processing-Load Account of Early False-Belief Understanding

Prior to age four, children succeed in non-elicited-response false-belief tasks but fail elicited-response false-belief tasks. To explain this discrepancy, the processing-load account argues that the capacity to represent beliefs emerges in infancy, as indicated by early success on non-elicited-response tasks, but that children's ability to demonstrate this capacity depends on the processing demands of the task and children's processing skills. When processing demands exceed young children's processing abilities, such as in standard elicited-response tasks, children fail despite their capacity to represent beliefs. Support for this account comes from recent evidence that reducing processing demands improves young children's performance: when demands are sufficiently reduced, 2.5-year-olds succeed in elicited-response tasks. Here we sought complementary evidence for the processing-load account by examining whether increasing processing demands impeded children's performance in a non-elicited-response task. 3-year-olds were tested in a preferential-looking task in which they heard a change-of-location false-belief story accompanied by a picture book; across children, we manipulated the amount of linguistic ambiguity in the story. The final page of the book showed two images: one that was consistent with the main character's false belief and one that was consistent with reality. When the story was relatively unambiguous, children looked reliably longer at the false-belief-consistent image, successfully demonstrating their false-belief understanding. When the story was ambiguous, however, this undermined children's performance: looking times to the belief-consistent image were correlated with verbal ability, and only children with verbal skills in the upper quartile of the sample demonstrated a significant preference for the belief-consistent image. These results support the processing-load account by demonstrating that regardless of whether a task involves an elicited response, children's performance depends on the processing demands of the task and their processing skills. These findings also have implications for alternative, deflationary accounts of early false-belief understanding.

Infants understand deceptive intentions to implant false beliefs about identity: New evidence for early mentalistic reasoning

Are infants capable of representing false beliefs, as the mentalistic account of early psychological reasoning suggests, or are they incapable of doing so, as the minimalist account suggests? The present research sought to shed light on this debate by testing the minimalist claim that a signature limit of early psychological reasoning is a specific inability to understand false beliefs about identity: because of their limited representational capabilities, infants should be unable to make sense of situations where an agent mistakes one object for another, visually identical object. To evaluate this claim, three experiments examined whether 17-month-olds could reason about the actions of a deceptive agent who sought to implant in another agent a false belief about the identity of an object. In each experiment, a thief attempted to secretly steal a desirable rattling toy during its owner's absence by substituting a less desirable silent toy. Infants realized that this substitution could be effective only if the silent toy was visually identical to the rattling toy (Experiment 1) and the owner did not routinely shake her toy when she returned (Experiment 2). When these conditions were met, infants expected the owner to be deceived and to mistake the silent toy for the rattling toy she had left behind (Experiment 3). Together, these results cast doubt on the minimalist claim that infants cannot represent false beliefs about identity. More generally, these results indicate that infants in the 2nd year of life can reason not only about the actions of agents who hold false beliefs, but also about the actions of agents who seek to implant false beliefs, thus providing new support for the mentalistic claim that an abstract capacity to reason about false beliefs emerges early in human development.

A Second Look at Automatic Theory of Mind

In recent work, Kovács, Téglás, and Endress (2010) argued that human adults automatically represented other agents’ beliefs even when those beliefs were completely irrelevant to the task being performed. In a series of 13 experiments, we replicated these previous findings but demonstrated that the effects found arose from artifacts in the experimental paradigm. In particular, the critical findings demonstrating automatic belief computation were driven by inconsistencies in the timing of an attention check, and thus do not provide evidence for automatic theory of mind in adults.

13-Month-Olds’ Understanding of Social Interactions

In the present research, we investigated how 13-month-olds use their emergent theory-of-mind understanding (i.e., understanding about other people’s mental states, such as their intentions, perceptions, and beliefs) and social-evaluation skills to make sense of social interactions. The infants watched three puppets (A, B, and C) interact. The results showed that after seeing Agents A and B interact in a positive manner, infants expected them to continue doing so, even after they saw B hit another agent, C, while A was absent. When A was present to witness B’s harmful action, however, infants expected A to change his or her behavior and ignore B. Therefore, infants seemed to consider A’s perspectives when predicting A’s actions. Furthermore, if B accidentally hit C when A was present, infants seemed to accept that A could interact or not interact with B, which suggests that they had taken into account B’s intention in their interpretations of the agents’ interactions.