Les modèles évolutionnistes peuvent-ils bénéficier des recherches développementales sur la théorie de l'esprit?

Abstract

Can developmental research on Theory of Mind inform evolutionary models ? Programmatic research was conducted to investigate developmental progressions in children's ability to enact and decipher intentionally deceptive communication in various game-playing situations. Initial studies reveal a stepwise progression from simple to more complex strategies in children 's spontaneous deception. In the Contingency Detection Task (cdt), children are invited to play a card game in which the experimenter poses a nonverbal signal (smiling) that is systematically associated with the truthfulness (or falseness) of a cue provided to the child ; 50 % of children older than 7 years solved the cdt, compared to 8 % of the younger children. There was also a significant effect of condition in this older group ; 72 % of the children in the condition [smile — false] solved the task, but only 24 % solved the task when the experimenter maintained a neutral expression when providing a misleading cue. This «poker face » effect reveals that children at this age have learned to associate some smiles with attempts at deception. Developmental data suggest a hierarchical progression that may be implicit in both the development and evolution of communication. At the first level, information communicated from sender to receiver is taken at face value. At the second level, sender's strategy of producing a false signal to manipulate the behavior of receiver emerges. At the third level, receiver comprehends that sender's message may be misleading and seeks to detect the truth. In this model, production precedes comprehension, that is, the sender is capable of taking into account receiver 's perspective, before receiver is able to take account of sender's taking account of receiver 's perspective.