14-Month-olds anticipate others' actions based on their belief about an object's identity

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.

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

Empirical assumptions behind the violation of expectation experiments in human and non-human animals

One of the most widely used procedures applied to non-human animals or pre-linguistic humans is the "violation of expectation paradigm". Curiously there is almost no discussion in the philosophical literature about it. Our objective will be to provide a first approach to the meta-theoretical nature of the assumptions behind the procedure that appeals to the violation of expectation and to extract some consequences. We show that behind them exists an empirical principle that affirms that the violation of the expectation of certain mental rules generates surprise. We then proceeded to discuss the nature of these "mental rules". We show that, as is often the case with theoretical concepts proposed by theories, they do not have a fixed interpretation. This will allow us to show that the usual relationship found in the developmental psychology literature between this experimental paradigm and cognitive approaches (which interpret experimental results in terms of higher-level mental activities) is not necessary. Finally, we relate this experimental design with the mark test and the inequity aversion test and discuss the possible ampliation of the application of the empirical principle of violation of expectation.

Can infants adopt underspecified contents into attributed beliefs? Representational prerequisites of theory of mind

Recent evidence suggests that young infants, as well as nonhuman apes, can anticipate others' behavior based on their false beliefs. While such behaviors have been proposed to be accounted by simple associations between agents, objects, and locations, human adults are undoubtedly endowed with sophisticated theory of mind abilities. For example, they can attribute mental contents about abstract or non-existing entities, or beliefs whose content is poorly specified. While such endeavors may be human specific, it is unclear whether the representational apparatus that allows for encoding such beliefs is present early in development. In four experiments we asked whether 15-month-old infants are able to attribute beliefs with underspecified content, update their content later, and maintain attributed beliefs that are unknown to be true or false. In Experiment 1, infants observed as an agent hid an object to an unspecified location. This location was later revealed in the absence or presence of the agent, and the object was then hidden again to an unspecified location. Then the infants could search for the object while the agent was away. Their search was biased to the revealed location (that could be represented as the potential content of the agent's belief when she had not witnessed the re-hiding), suggesting that they (1) first attributed an underspecified belief to the agent, (2) later updated the content of this belief, and (3) were primed by this content in their own action even though its validity was unknown. This priming effect was absent when the agent witnessed the re-hiding of the object, and thus her belief about the earlier location of the object did not have to be sustained. The same effect was observed when infants searched for a different toy (Experiment 2) or when an additional spatial transformation was introduced (Experiment 4), but not when the spatial transformation disrupted belief updating (Experiment 3). These data suggest that infants' representational apparatus is prepared to efficiently track other agents' beliefs online, encode underspecified beliefs and define their content later, possibly reflecting a crucial characteristic of mature theory of mind: using a metarepresentational format for ascribed beliefs.

2.5-year-olds succeed in identity and location elicited-response false-belief tasks with adequate response practice

Researchers have argued that traditional elicited-response false-belief tasks involve considerable processing demands and hence underestimate children's false-belief understanding. Consistent with this claim, Setoh et al. (2016) recently found that when processing demands were sufficiently reduced, children could succeed in an elicited-response task as early as 2.5 years of age. Here we examined whether 2.5-year-olds could also succeed in a low-demand elicited-response task involving false beliefs about identity, which have been argued to provide a critical test of whether children truly represent beliefs, while also clarifying how the practice trials in Setoh et al.'s task facilitated children's elicited-response performance. 2.5-year-olds were tested in a version of Setoh et al.'s elicited-response task in which they heard a location or identity false-belief story. We varied whether the practice trials had the same type of wh-question as the test trial. Children who heard the same type of wh-question on all trials succeeded regardless of which story they heard (location or identity) and performance did not differ across belief type. This replicates Setoh et al.'s positive results and demonstrates that when processing demands are sufficiently reduced, children can succeed in elicited-response tasks involving false beliefs about object location or identity. This suggests that children are capable of attributing genuine false beliefs prior to 4 years of age. However, children performed at chance if the practice trials involved a different type of wh-question than the test trials, suggesting that at this age practice with the wh-question used in the test trial is essential to children's success.