Do infants understand false beliefs? We don’t know yet – A commentary on Baillargeon, Buttelmann and Southgate’s commentary

Poulin‐Dubois, Diane; Rakoczy, Hannes; Burnside, Kimberly; Crivello, Cristina; Dörrenberg, Sebastian; Edwards, Katheryn; Krist, Horst; Kulke, Louisa; Liszkowski, Ulf; Low, Jason; Perner, Josef; Powell, Lindsey J.; Priewasser, Beate; Rafetseder, Eva; Ruffman, Ted

doi:10.1016/j.cogdev.2018.09.005

Cited by 83 publications

(64 citation statements)

References 51 publications

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“…It is not only the underlying processes, but also the exact developmental trajectory and potential limitations of implicit ToM processes that remain an open question. Recent studies have had difficulty replicating findings from different implicit ToM tasks (51)(52)(53), have reported considerably later developmental onsets of success in these tasks (53), and have reported specific performance limitations (53,54). Behavioral success in the current MRI sample was also weaker than in the original behavioral study of our implicit ToM paradigm (27), which likely resulted from reduced power in the smaller sample of children with usable MRI data.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 76%

Two systems for thinking about others’ thoughts in the developing brain

Wiesmann

Friederici

Singer

et al. 2020

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Human social interaction crucially relies on the ability to infer what other people think. Referred to as Theory of Mind (ToM), this ability has long been argued to emerge around 4 y of age when children start passing traditional verbal ToM tasks. This developmental dogma has recently been questioned by nonverbal ToM tasks passed by infants younger than 2 y of age. How do young children solve these tests, and what is their relation to the later-developing verbal ToM reasoning? Are there two different systems for nonverbal and verbal ToM, and when is the developmental onset of mature adult ToM? To address these questions, we related markers of cortical brain structure (i.e., cortical thickness and surface area) of 3- and 4-y-old children to their performance in novel nonverbal and traditional verbal TM tasks. We showed that verbal ToM reasoning was supported by cortical surface area and thickness of the precuneus and temporoparietal junction, classically involved in ToM in adults. Nonverbal ToM reasoning, in contrast, was supported by the cortical structure of a distinct and independent neural network including the supramarginal gyrus also involved in emotional and visual perspective taking, action observation, and social attention or encoding biases. This neural dissociation suggests two systems for reasoning about others’ minds—mature verbal ToM that emerges around 4 y of age, whereas nonverbal ToM tasks rely on different earlier-developing possibly social-cognitive processes.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 76%

Two systems for thinking about others’ thoughts in the developing brain

Wiesmann

Friederici

Singer

et al. 2020

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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“…Rakoczy and Behne have described the current findings regarding implicit studies as "complex, confusing and puzzling" (Rakoczy and Behne 2019, p. 94), and concluded that infants' ToM abilities are unknown. Others conclude that at least strong interpretations of infant ToM abilities (attributing to them an understanding of propositional attitudes) are unsupported by current data (Poulin-Dubois et al 2018).…”

Section: Non-verbal ('Implicit') False Belief Tasksmentioning

confidence: 83%

The cultural evolution of mind-modelling

Moore

2020

Synthese

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I argue that uniquely human forms of ‘Theory of Mind’ (or ‘ToM’) are a product of cultural evolution. Specifically, propositional attitude psychology is a linguistically constructed folk model of the human mind, invented by our ancestors for a range of tasks and refined over successive generations of users. The construction of these folk models gave humans new tools for thinking and reasoning about mental states—and so imbued us with abilities not shared by non-linguistic species. I also argue that uniquely human forms of ToM are not required for language development, such that an account of the cultural origins of ToM does not jeopardise the explanation of language development. Finally, I sketch a historical model of the cultural evolution of mental state talk.

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“…Against this picture, however, there have been notable failures to replicate the evidence for implicit understanding of beliefs in infancy (34)(35)(36)(37)(38)(39)(40). A recent meta-analysis found that nonverbal false-belief tasks are especially unlikely to replicate, relative to nonverbal tasks assessing other aspects of theory of mind (41).…”

Section: The Role Of Theory Of Mind In Children's Moral Evaluationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Toddlers' social evaluations of agents who act on false beliefs

Woo¹,

Spelke²

2020

Preprint

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Two experiments investigated whether infants’ social evaluations privilege the objective consequences of others’ acts of helping or the beliefs on which helping is based, even when others’ beliefs are false and their actions produce no beneficial outcomes. Fifteen-month-old infants (N = 94) viewed videotaped puppet shows in which a protagonist sought to obtain one of two objects, each inside a different box, and two helpers alternately opened the box containing that object. Then the two objects switched boxes, either in the helpers’ presence or absence, and infants saw one helper open the new box, affording access to the desired object, and the other helper open the original box, affording access to the forsaken object. When both helpers had witnessed the change in object locations, infants preferentially reached for and looked at the former helper, who acted to make the desired object available in its new location. In contrast, when neither helper had witnessed the change in object locations, infants preferentially reached for and looked at the helper who opened the original, now-empty box where the two helpers had last seen the desired object. The latter effect provides evidence that infants inferred the beliefs of the helpers from the events they did or did not witness, and infants evaluated the helpers in accord with their inferred beliefs. Belief-based social evaluation thus occurs early in the second year, well before children begin to talk about beliefs or connect false beliefs to actions in a wide array of explicit, verbal tasks.

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Do infants understand false beliefs? We don’t know yet – A commentary on Baillargeon, Buttelmann and Southgate’s commentary

Cited by 83 publications

References 51 publications

Two systems for thinking about others’ thoughts in the developing brain

Two systems for thinking about others’ thoughts in the developing brain

The cultural evolution of mind-modelling

Toddlers' social evaluations of agents who act on false beliefs

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