Infants attribute false beliefs to a toy crane

Abstract

The mentalistic view of early theory of mind posits that infants possess a robust and sophisticated understanding of false belief that is masked by the demands of traditional explicit tasks. Much of the evidence supporting this mentalistic view comes from infants’ looking time at events that violate their expectations about the beliefs of a human agent. We conducted a replication of the violation‐of‐expectation procedure, except that the human agent was replaced by an inanimate agent. Infants watched a toy crane repeatedly move toward a box containing an object. In the absence of the crane, the object changed location. When the crane returned, 16‐month‐old infants looked longer when it turned toward the object's new location, consistent with the attribution of a false belief to the crane. These results suggest that infants spontaneously attribute false beliefs to inanimate agents. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at https://youtu.be/qqEPPhd9FDo

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

“…So far, independent replication attempts have largely yielded null findings, and exceptions are difficult to interpret: First, Yott and Poulin-Dubois (2012) did reproduce the original effects, but only after a rule training phase. Second, and quite ironically, a recent replication study with an analogous scenario as Onishi & Baillargeon's, approved by Renée Baillargeon ( personal communication, October 2017) generated a "replication" in the sense that children produced the same pattern of looking times (Burnside, Severdija & Poulin-Dubois, 2018). Crucially, however, the scenarios differed from the original ones in that the human protagonist was replaced by a toy crane with minimal animacy properties.…”

“…They leave little (if any) room for attributing non-replication findings to procedural deviations from original methods. Many such direct replications have recently been conducted, four of them reported in the special issue (Burnside et al, 2018;Grosse Wiesmann et al, 2018;Kulke et al, 2018a). Most of these direct replications, as well as less direct yet still very stringent conceptual replications converge in failing to replicate the original findings.…”

Infants Generalize Beliefs Across Individuals

“…An a priori power analysis required 48 infant participants per belief condition to obtain a moderate-strong effect size ( d = 0.90) and adequate power (1 − β = 0.85). This target effect size was taken from previous research ( Burnside et al, 2019 ).…”

“…The nature of the mechanisms involved in infants’ reasoning during the VOE task was recently examined in infants and adults in a conceptual replication – a live human agent was replaced by a live inanimate agent (i.e., a toy crane lacking all morphological animacy; Burnside et al, 2019 ). Results of Onishi and Baillargeon (2005) with a human agent were replicated, suggesting that 16-month-old infants generalize the attribution of false beliefs to an inanimate agent that displays agentive properties.…”

Testing the stability of theory of mind: A longitudinal approach

“…This suggests that some building blocks are laid down in infancy for the development of later ToM understanding, but that the VOE false belief task, as currently used in infancy, might not be the best measure of such abilities. The fact that infants attribute false beliefs to an inanimate object or generalize beliefs to ignorant agents suggests that this task measures, at best, an immature form of theory of mind [67,68]. Future research will be required to establish the construct validity for implicit false belief tasks, an endeavor currently undertaken by the Man-yBabies2 project, which aims to conduct strict replications of the anticipatory looking, VOE, and interactive tasks in a large number of laboratories [69].…”