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A simple explanation of apparent early mindreading: infants’ sensitivity to goals and gaze direction

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Abstract

According to a widely shared interpretation, research employing spontaneous-response false belief tasks demonstrates that infants as young as 15 months attribute (false) beliefs. In contrast with this conclusion, I advance an alternative reading of the empirical data. I argue that infants constantly form and update their expectations about others’ behaviour and that this ability extends in the course of development to reflect an appreciation of what others can and cannot see. These basic capacities account for infants’ performance in spontaneous-response false belief tasks without the need to assume the existence of a cognitive module specific for mental state attribution. My proposal suggests a plausible explanatory strategy for the problem of the representational format of the information processed in spontaneous-response false belief tasks.

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Notes

  1. In this article, I will use “social cognitive” abilities in the place of “theory-of-mind” (or “mind reading”) abilities in order to focus on a particular phenomenon (i.e. the fact that infants manifest selective attention in spontaneous-response false belief tasks) rather than to the competence (i.e. the possession of a “theory of mind”) usually assumed to explain it.

  2. The final position of the toy was counterbalanced between the two locations generating two truth-belief and two false-belief conditions.

  3. “This and other results suggested that the infants realized that, because the agent had not seen the toy move to Location B, she still believed the toy to be in Location A” (Song and Baillargeon 2008, p. 1790).

  4. This is also the original interpretation of the data of researchers who turned later to thicker mentalist interpretations of the same capacities (Csibra et al. 2003; Csibra and Gergely 1998).

  5. Luo and Johnson (2009) constitute a possible refutation. They argue that 6-month-olds already consider that barriers can prevent seeing because they interpret an actor’s grasping as goal-directed only when another object is present and not hidden by a screen. Nevertheless, barriers in their experiment always prevented the actor both from seeing and from reaching for the object. In experiment 2, which was supposed to control for this factor, the actor was turned on a side thereby unable to grasp one of the objects. The experiment thus shows only that 6-month-olds respond to how barriers prevent intentional grasping. This is consistent with research showing that 10- but not 8-month-olds selectively respond to unsuccessful actions due to the presence of a barrier (Brandone and Wellman 2009).

  6. Although see Saxe et al. (2004) and Saxe and Wexler (2005) for a discussion of neurofunctional evidence of belief attribution capacities in adults, and Grafton (2009) and Van Overwalle (2009) for a discussion on the neural bases for action observation and interpretation in adults.

  7. In a control condition, the caterpillar’s knowledge (or ignorance) of the position of the objects was obtained by manipulating her presence on the scene at the moment the hand placed the objects beyond two tall screens. Results between the two conditions were comparable.

  8. This is opposed to the behavioural explanation considered by Luo (2011a, p. 296), according to which infants will interpret the actor’s pushing the toy beyond the opaque screen as a manifestation of disinterest.

  9. Recent studies also found that both children (Low and Watts 2013) and adults (Surtees et al. 2011) automatically compute what other people can see but not under which perspective they can see it. These findings hardly fit Scott and Baillargeon’s (2009) result that 18-month-olds already process other visual perspective.

  10. See also de Bruin et al. (2011, p. 509) for a similar criticism addressed to Apperly and Butterfill (2009): “encounterings only have a mind-to-world direction of fit on a purely passive, observational understanding of them. In view of developments in the philosophy and neuroscience of perception such as enactivist and ecological theories of perception (e.g. Gibson 1979; Hurley 1998; Noë 2004), however, it seems much more plausible to conceive of encountering in terms of an agent’s being sensitive to the specific affordances of the object-at-a-location encountered. The agent’s ‘field’ in which the object occurs, then, is primarily a field of affordances”.

  11. “Whereas nativists have claimed that they believe in learning but that learning is ‘hard’ (Leslie et al. 2004), there is evidence that learning about patterns, changes in the environment, object motion, and object/event relations might not be so hard after all. Mental states such as goals predictably co-occur with certain behavioural patterns and children’s recognition of such patterns can bootstrap their understanding of mental states” (Ruffman et al. 2012, p. 94).

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Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Cristiano Castelfranchi, Jay Garfield, Christopher Gauker, Daniel Hutto, Jean Mandler, Albert Newen, Josef Perner, Jill de Villiers, Silvano Zipoli Caiani, and two anonymous reviewers for useful discussion and comments on previous versions of this article. Preparation of this article was supported by a Short Research Grant for Doctoral Candidates and Young Academics and Scientists from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and by a visiting fellowship from the Center of Mind, Brain, and Cognitive Evolution at the Department of Philosophy, Ruhr-University Bochum.

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Fenici, M. A simple explanation of apparent early mindreading: infants’ sensitivity to goals and gaze direction. Phenom Cogn Sci 14, 497–515 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-014-9345-3

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