Probing the depth of infants’ theory of mind: disunity in performance across paradigms

Poulin‐Dubois, Diane; Yott, Jessica

doi:10.1111/desc.12600

Cited by 46 publications

(41 citation statements)

References 68 publications

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“…The researchers argued that infants who had a better understanding of the knowledge state of others were better able to infer that the unreliable speaker was not knowledgeable. However, such a link does not support the view that infants have a rich theory of mind, as there is also a controversial debate in the literature regarding the depth of infants’ theory of mind abilities with many recent studies providing support for a lean interpretation (Heyes, ; Poulin‐Dubois & Yott, ; Ruffman, ). Nonetheless, the present findings provide additional support for the interpretation that infants’ selective trust is related to domain‐specific abilities, such as the precursors of theory of mind or socio‐cognitive abilities.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Infants’ Ability to Detect Emotional Incongruency: Deep or Shallow?

Crivello¹,

Poulin‐Dubois²

2019

Infancy

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Infants can detect individuals who demonstrate emotions that are incongruent with an event and are less likely to trust them. However, the nature of the mechanisms underlying this selectivity is currently subject to controversy. The objective of this study was to examine whether infants’ socio‐cognitive and associative learning skills are linked to their selective trust. A total of 102 14‐month‐olds were exposed to a person who demonstrated congruent or incongruent emotional referencing (e.g., happy when looking inside an empty box), and were tested on their willingness to follow the emoter's gaze. Knowledge inference and associative learning tasks were also administered. It was hypothesized that infants would be less likely to trust the incongruent emoter and that this selectivity would be related to their associative learning skills, and not their socio‐cognitive skills. The results revealed that infants were not only able to detect the incongruent emoter, but were subsequently less likely to follow her gaze toward an object invisible to them. More importantly, infants who demonstrated superior performance on the knowledge inference task, but not the associative learning task, were better able to detect the person's emotional incongruency. These findings provide additional support for the rich interpretation of infants’ selective trust.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Infants’ Ability to Detect Emotional Incongruency: Deep or Shallow?

Crivello¹,

Poulin‐Dubois²

2019

Infancy

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“…Apperly & Butterfill, 2009). Such targeted examinations may reveal stronger relations between similar tasks, although recent work does suggest that even similar implicit measures do not correlate (Kulke et al, 2018;Grosso et al, 2019;Poulin-Dubois & Yott, 2018;Powell et al, 2018).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Minimal coherence among varied theory of mind measures in childhood and adulthood

Warnell¹,

Redcay²

2019

Preprint

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Theory of mind-or the understanding that others have mental states that can differ from one's own and reality-is currently measured across the lifespan by a wide array of tasks. These tasks vary across dimensions including modality, complexity, affective content, and whether responses are explicit or implicit. As a result, theoretical and meta-analytic work has begun to question whether such varied approaches to theory of mind should be categorized as capturing a single construct. To directly address the coherence of theory of mind, and to determine whether that coherence changes across development, we administered a diverse set of theory of mind measures to three different samples: preschoolers, schoolaged children, and adults. All tasks showed wide variability in performance, indicating that children and adults often have inconsistent and partial mastery of theory of mind concepts. Further, for all ages studied, the selected theory of mind tasks showed minimal correlations with each other. That is, having high levels of theory of mind on one task did not predict performance on another task designed to measure the same underlying ability. In addition to showing the importance of more carefully designing and selecting theory of mind measures, these findings also suggest that understanding others' internal states may be a multidimensional process that interacts with other abilities, a process which may not occur in a single conceptual framework. Future research should systematically investigate task coherence via large-scale and longitudinal efforts to determine how we come to understand the minds of others.3

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“…We investigated metacognition of one's own ignorance, demonstrated at 18‐months of age (Goupil et al, ), whereas previous efforts to examine the correlates of selective trust in infancy investigated ToM abilities—those that have been shown to emerge as early as 7‐months (Kovács, Téglás, & Endress, ). Although evidence of infant ToM rests on a similar debate surrounding its origins (see Heyes, ; Poulin‐Dubois & Yott, ; Ruffman, ; Scott & Baillargeon, ), it appears that there may be more opportunity for the development of mental state attribution abilities relative to an understanding of one's own knowledge (but see Gonzales, Fabricius, & Kupfer, ; Harris, Yang, & Cui, ; Meltzoff, for different views). Recent longitudinal research provides support for the primacy of ToM over metacognition (Ebert, ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Knowing who knows: Metacognitive and causal learning abilities guide infants’ selective social learning

Kuzyk

Grossman

Poulin‐Dubois

2019

Developmental Science

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Given the widespread interest in the development of children's selective social learning, there is mounting evidence suggesting that infants prefer to learn from competent informants (Poulin‐Dubois & Brosseau‐Liard, Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2016, 25). However, little research has been dedicated to understanding how this selectivity develops. The present study investigated whether causal learning and precursor metacognitive abilities govern discriminant learning in a classic word‐learning paradigm. Infants were exposed to a speaker who accurately (reliable condition) or inaccurately (unreliable condition) labeled familiar objects and were subsequently tested on their ability to learn a novel word from the informant. The predictive power of causal learning skills and precursor metacognition (as measured through decision confidence) on infants' word learning was examined across both reliable and unreliable conditions. Results suggest that infants are more inclined to accept an unreliable speaker's testimony on a word learning task when they also lack confidence in their own knowledge on a task measuring their metacognitive ability. Additionally, when uncertain, infants draw on causal learning abilities to better learn the association between a label and a novel toy. This study is the first to shed light on the role of causal learning and precursor metacognitive judgments in infants' abilities to engage in selective trust.

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Probing the depth of infants’ theory of mind: disunity in performance across paradigms

Cited by 46 publications

References 68 publications

Infants’ Ability to Detect Emotional Incongruency: Deep or Shallow?

Infants’ Ability to Detect Emotional Incongruency: Deep or Shallow?

Minimal coherence among varied theory of mind measures in childhood and adulthood

Knowing who knows: Metacognitive and causal learning abilities guide infants’ selective social learning

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