Abstract
A large body of work has focused on children’s ability to attribute mental states to other people, and whether these abilities are influenced by the extent and nature of children’s social interactions. However, it remains largely unknown which developmental factors shape children’s ability to influence the mental states of others. Building on the suggestion that collaborative experiences early in life might be crucial for the emergence of mental coordination abilities, here we assess the relative contribution of social exposure to familial and non-familial agents on children’s communicative adjustments to their mental model of an addressee (‘audience design’). During an online interactive game, five-year-olds spontaneously organized their non-verbal communicative behaviors according to their beliefs about an interlocutor. The magnitude of these communicative adjustments was predicted by the time spent at daycare, from birth until four years of age, over and above effects of familial social environment. These results suggest that the degree of non-familial social interaction early in life modulates the influence that children’s beliefs have on their referential communicative behavior.
Highlights
Humans often use un-observable variables like beliefs, desires, and intentions to disambiguate agents’ behavior, attributing mental states to other people and to oneself [1,2]
Given that audience design presupposes control of the ability to share mental states with others, we focus on five-year-old children, i.e. children with fully-fledged theory of mind capacities [16]
Communicative Adjustments We tested whether 5-year-old children are able to adapt their referential communicative behavior to the presumed age, or cognitive level, of their interlocutor
Summary
Humans often use un-observable variables like beliefs, desires, and intentions to disambiguate agents’ behavior, attributing mental states to other people and to oneself [1,2]. These mentalizing abilities emerge during early childhood [3] and variations in mentalizing skills appear to be related to social environmental factors [4]. Five-year-old children can produce verbal requests that take into account the presumed knowledge of their interlocutor [10] It remains largely unknown how children learn to adjust their referential communicative behaviors to their mental model of an addressee
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