The Social Sense: Susceptibility to Others’ Beliefs in Human Infants and Adults

Abstract

Human social interactions crucially depend on the ability to represent other agents' beliefs even when these contradict our own beliefs, leading to the potentially complex problem of simultaneously holding two conflicting representations in mind. Here, we show that adults and 7-month-olds automatically encode others' beliefs, and that, surprisingly, others' beliefs have similar effects as the participants' own beliefs. In a visual object detection task, participants' beliefs and the beliefs of an agent (whose beliefs were irrelevant to performing the task) both modulated adults' reaction times and infants' looking times. Moreover, the agent's beliefs influenced participants' behavior even after the agent had left the scene, suggesting that participants computed the agent's beliefs online and sustained them, possibly for future predictions about the agent's behavior. Hence, the mere presence of an agent automatically triggers powerful processes of belief computation that may be part of a "social sense" crucial to human societies.

Surprise! 20-month-old infants understand the emotional consequences of false beliefs

“…First, they confirm prior findings that by the second year of life, infants can attribute false beliefs to agents (e.g., Buttelmann et al, 2009;Kovács et al, 2010;Luo, 2011;Onishi & Baillargeon, 2005;Scott et al, 2015;Senju et al, 2011;Träuble et al, 2010). Second, these results extend these findings to a novel belief-based response: infants can reason not only about which location a mistaken agent will act on, but also about how her false belief will affect her subsequent emotional displays.…”

“…This growing body of evidence casts doubt on the notion that infants' successful performance in falsebelief tasks is the result of primitive abilities that apply to only a limited range of situations and behaviors. Such findings instead support recent mentalistic accounts, which propose that infants make sense of agents' behavior by reasoning about their motivational, epistemic, and counterfactual states (e.g., Baillargeon, Scott, & Bian, 2016;Baillargeon et al, 2010;Barrett et al, 2013;Buttelmann et al, 2009;Carruthers, 2013;Kovács et al, 2010;Luo, 2011;Scott et al, 2010;Southgate et al, 2007;Surian et al, 2007).…”

“…The results of such tasks suggested that the ability to attribute false beliefs to others did not emerge until at least 4 years of age (for reviews, see Devine & Hughes, 2014;Wellman, Cross, & Watson, 2001). Recently, however, researchers have developed a number of alternative paradigms for assessing false-belief understanding in much younger children (e.g., Buttelmann, Carpenter, & Tomasello, 2009;Kovács, Téglás, & Endress, 2010;Luo, 2011;Onishi & Baillargeon, 2005;Scott, Baillargeon, Song, & Leslie, 2010;Southgate, Senju, & Csibra, 2007). Positive results have now been obtained with infants aged 8 to 25 months using a variety of response measures (for reviews, see Baillargeon et al, 2015;Scott, Roby, & Smith, in press), leading many investigators to conclude that the capacity to attribute false belief to others emerges by at least the end of the first year of life (e.g., Baillargeon, Scott, & He, 2010;Barrett et al, 2013;Buttelmann et al, 2009;Carruthers, 2013;Kovács et al, 2010;Luo, 2011;Scott, in press;Southgate et al, 2007;Surian, Caldi, & Sperber, 2007).…”

Approximating Implicit and Explicit Mentalizing with Two Naturalistic Video-Based Tasks in Typical Development and Autism Spectrum Disorder

“…In typical development implicit mentalizing develops during the first year of life (e.g., Kovács et al 2010) and is seen as a precursor to explicit mentalizing, i.e., giving the correct reasoning for a person's (false) belief (Clements et al 2000;Low and Perner 2012;Thoermer et al 2012). Young infants, for example, track the beliefs of others (Kovács et al 2010;Onishi and Baillargeon 2005) without necessarily being able to make correct explicit belief inferences (Ruffman et al 2001).…”

“…Young infants, for example, track the beliefs of others (Kovács et al 2010;Onishi and Baillargeon 2005) without necessarily being able to make correct explicit belief inferences (Ruffman et al 2001). During adulthood, implicit and explicit mentalizing processes seem to coexist mediating distinct features of social cognition.…”