How Sophisticated Is Infants’ Theory of Mind?

Understanding preferences in infancy

“…At the outset, research efforts on infants' preference understanding are largely directed at uncovering infant abilities to interpret others' (henceforth agents, i.e., entities that can control their behavior, human or nonhuman, Baillargeon et al, 2015) actions in terms of psychological causes such as intentions, dispositions (including preferences), and epistemic states (e.g., Baillargeon et al, 2016; Scott et al, 2022). Such endeavors are derived from theoretical views on an initial state of human cognition suggesting that infants hold primitive understandings about several core domains (e.g., of physical, psychological, and numerical knowledge), possibly due to our evolutionary history, while also emphasizing the impact of learning and experiences on knowledge acquisition (e.g., Baillargeon et al, 2011; Baillargeon & Carey, 2012; Gelman & Williams, 1998; Spelke & Kinzler, 2007; Wellman & Gelman, 1997).…”

“…This set of results underscores the non‐egocentric feature of infant preference understanding. That is, infants use the agent's representation of a scene (e.g., only object‐A present), rather than their own representation (e.g., both objects A and B present), to make sense of the agent's actions (for reviews on results showing infant considerations of agents' beliefs, not their own, in their psychological reasoning system, see e.g., Scott & Baillargeon, 2017; Scott et al, 2022; for the relevant debate, see e.g., Baillargeon et al, 2018; Powell et al, 2018).…”

“…Over the past several decades, an impressive body of cognitive developmental research has revealed that even infants possess relatively sophisticated understandings about preferences. In the first year of life, infants seem to view others' preferences as dispositional internal states (for reviews, see Baillargeon et al, 2016; Scott et al, 2022), not unlike adults do, although the affective components of preferences to signal liking or disliking are rarely included in the studies with these young infants, as described below, which warrants more in‐depth investigations. Recent research on early social knowledge (for reviews, see Baillargeon et al, 2015; Tasimi, 2020) further suggests that preference understanding also plays a role in infants' construal of social interactions and social relationships.…”

The Violation-of-Expectation Paradigm: A Conceptual Overview

“…In the area of false-belief understanding, for example, two-system accounts assume that two distinct psychological-reasoning systems, a minimal early-emerging system and a more advanced late-developing system, underlie success in VOE and traditional false-belief tasks, respectively (Butterfill & Apperly, 2013;Low et al, 2016). In contrast, one-system accounts assume that both types of tasks are carried out by the same system, that processing demands are primarily responsible for preschoolers' difficulties with traditional tasks, and that false-belief understanding shows substantial continuity from its emergence in infancy to its more skilled and nuanced expression in the school-aged years (Carruthers, 2016;Leslie et al, 2004;Scott et al, 2022).…”

Can 5‐month‐old infants consider the perspective of a novel eyeless agent? New evidence for early mentalistic reasoning

“…Are infants in the first year of life (henceforth young infants) already able to attribute to an ignorant agent a representation of a scene that differs from their own? When researchers began studying epistemic reasoning in infancy, two types of accounts were proposed that offered different answers to this question (for a recent review, see Scott et al, in press).…”