Abstract
It has been argued that infants possess a rich, sophisticated theory of mind (ToM) that is only revealed with tasks based on spontaneous responses. A mature (ToM) implies the understanding that mental states are person specific. Previous studies on infants’ understanding of motivational mental states, such as goals and preferences have revealed that, by 9 months of age, infants do not generalize these motivational mental states across agents. However, it remains to be determined if infants also perceive epistemic states as person specific. Therefore, the goal of the present study was to use a switch agent paradigm with the classic false belief violation-of-expectation task. Results revealed that 16-month-old infants attributed true and false beliefs to a naïve agent – they did not perceive beliefs as person specific. These findings indicate that the mechanisms that underlie infants’ implicit attribution of beliefs differ from those assumed for explicit reasoning about beliefs.
Highlights
The depth of infants’ theory of mind (ToM) is currently the subject of a heated debate
An issue that has been raised in the context of the infant ToM debate is whether infants’ understanding of beliefs is based on the same mechanisms as those reported for older children and adults, as posited by the mentalistic view
We aimed to replicate Onishi and Baillargeon’s (2005) methodology with two important modifications: two agents were introduced during a pre-trial and an ignorant agent replaced the knowledgeable agent at the test trial – akin to the paradigm used by Buresh and Woodward (2007)
Summary
The depth of infants’ theory of mind (ToM) is currently the subject of a heated debate. A large number of studies have challenged this view by providing evidence for early ToM understanding in infancy using tasks that have minimal processing demands (Clements and Perner, 1994; Gergely et al, 1995; Onishi and Baillargeon, 2005; Phillips and Wellman, 2005; Scott, 2017). These implicit tasks, which measure infants’ spontaneous looking or actions, provided further insight into precocious ToM in infants as young as 7 months of age. Given the current relevance of this debate, the goal of the current study is to determine if the construct measured by implicit tasks corresponds to a fully formed, sophisticated ToM understanding – equivalent to the ToM understanding found in preschoolers and adults using explicit, elicited-response tasks as is suggested by the mentalistic view
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