A two-lab direct replication attempt of Southgate, Senju and Csibra (2007).

D Kampis,M Hernik,P Kármán,G Csibra,V Southgate

doi:10.1098/rsos.210190

Abstract

The study by Southgate et al. (2007 Psychol. Sci. 18, 587–592. (doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01944.x)) has been widely cited as evidence for false-belief attribution in young children. Recent replication attempts of this paradigm have yielded mixed results: several studies did not replicate the original findings, raising doubts about the suitability of the paradigm to assess non-verbal action prediction and Theory of Mind. In a preregistered collaborative study including two of the original authors, we tested one hundred and sixty 24- to 26-month-olds across two locations using the original stimuli, procedure and analyses as closely as possible. We found no evidence for action anticipation: only roughly half of the infants looked to the location of an agent's impending action when action prediction did not require taking into account the agent's beliefs and a similar number when the agent held a false-belief. These results and other non-replications suggest that this paradigm does not reliably elicit action prediction and thus cannot assess false-belief understanding in 2-year-olds. While the present results do not support any claim regarding the presence or absence of Theory of Mind in infants, we conclude that an important piece of evidence that has to date supported arguments for the existence of this competence can no longer serve that function.

Highlights

Motivated by the seminal study of Onishi & Baillargeon [1], which reported an understanding of false beliefs in 15-month-old infants using a violation-of-expectation paradigm, Southgate et al [2] designed an eye-tracking study to test whether 25-month-old infants could anticipate actions on the basis of attributed false beliefs
As the paradigm contained no ‘task’, and different participants may be motivated to attend to different aspects of the scene, only those infants who made a correct anticipation on this second familiarization trial were included in the analyses of anticipatory looking in the subsequent test trial
Our primary dependent measure was whether infants anticipated correctly

Summary

Introduction

Motivated by the seminal study of Onishi & Baillargeon [1], which reported an understanding of false beliefs in 15-month-old infants using a violation-of-expectation paradigm, Southgate et al [2] designed an eye-tracking study to test whether 25-month-old infants could anticipate actions on the basis of attributed false beliefs. If infants are motivated to predict which window the agent would open, the light and sound cues on this second familiarization trial should prompt them to look to the window above the box containing the ball before the agent would reach through the window. As the paradigm contained no ‘task’, and different participants may be motivated to attend to different aspects of the scene, only those infants who made a correct anticipation on this second familiarization trial were included in the analyses of anticipatory looking in the subsequent test trial The reason for this criterion was that in order to interpret the data from the false-belief trial, evidence was needed for each infant that they were motivated and able to make a correct action prediction

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