Abstract
I review recent evidence that very young, pre-verbal infants attribute belief-like states when anticipating the behavior of others. This evidence is drawn from infant performance on non-verbal false belief tasks. I argue that, contrary to typical interpretations, such evidence does not show that infants attribute belief-like states. Rather, it shows that infants apply an enhanced version of what Gergely (2011) calls the “teleological stance” to brief bouts of behavior. This requires them to parse behavioral sequences into goals and rationally/informationally-constrained means of achieving them; however, it does not require the attribution of unobservable mental states, like beliefs, that are causally responsible for behavior.
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Notes
They also make the same judgment of their past selves, denying that they thought the box contained candy prior to opening it, even though this is exactly what they said.
The meta-analysis by Wellman et al. (2001) reviews a wide range of studies that support this timeline in the development of SFBT mastery. This meta-analysis has come under considerable criticism (see Yazdi et al. 2006 for a recent discussion). Also, there is considerable variation in the ages at which children show competence at SFBTs, with some showing such competence long before 4 years of age (Clements and Perner 1994; Carpenter et al. 2002; Happé and Loth 2002). My arguments in what follows are independent of these empirical details.
The scenario with which Onishi and Baillargeon (2005) presented the infants was not precisely the same as in the original Sally-Anne task; I describe it this way only for ease of exposition. The fundamental structure of the scenario was the same, and nothing turns on the differences in details.
Onishi & Baillargeon also ran a true belief version of the task, to make sure that infants do not just look longer, by default, at scenarios where Sally goes to the new toy/candy location. If Sally sees the toy/candy moved, the pattern of results is reversed: they look longer if she subsequently goes to where she left the toy/candy than if she goes to the new location, indicating that they understand that Sally has a true belief about the new location in this condition.
Of course, when it is put this baldly, most researchers impressed with the NVFBT results would adamantly deny this interpretation. However, as I show below, their interpretations of infant performance on NVFBTs often explicitly attribute the capacity to reason about the beliefs, desires and bouts of practical reasoning that animate interpretive targets. Furthermore, all these researchers claim parity between what the SFBTs and the NVFBTs show about understanding belief. So, if one thinks passing SFBTs is the most important milestone in the acquisition of the belief concept, then either one should reject this assumption (as I urge), or one must accept that passing NVFBTs is the most important milestone in the acquisition of the belief concept.
Apperly notes that “in a variety of studies using stories or real objects and using verbal or behavioural judgments, including scenarios where false belief and dual identity problems are very closely matched … the consistent pattern is that children who pass false belief tasks do not necessarily pass such Oedipus problems” (2011, 17). This is in direct conflict with Scott and Baillargeon’s (2009) claim that 18-month-old infants appreciate that others can represent an object—a toy penguin—under a different mode of presentation (as 1-piece rather than 2-piece). I argue below that this is a gross over-interpretation.
I realize that, in one sense, these are not tokens of the same belief type, since my belief is about me and your belief is about you. However, there are other ways of individuating beliefs that are more relevant to action explanation (Perry 1979). The beliefs are of the same type in the sense that they’re both about the agent who tokens them.
Accordingly, an appropriate test for mastery of the belief concept would require children to show some hesitation when attributing beliefs based on limited evidence, and perhaps attempts to find more evidence to rule out competing interpretations.
This does not require the attribution of false beliefs; it is merely a behavioral generalization: if an agent hasn’t witnessed an event relevant to her projects she is not likely to succeed at those projects. Scott & Baillargeon rule this possibility out by running versions of the false belief condition where the penguins are both placed under transparent covers or opaque covers. If infants assume only that ignorant interpretive targets will fail at the task, then this should not affect the results: infants should expect ignorant interpretive targets to select the wrong penguin, even if both are visible or both are invisible. However, this is not what occurs: infants have no expectation that the ignorant interpretive target will select the wrong penguin when both penguins are visible or invisible (Scott and Baillargeon 2009, 1188–1191).
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Zawidzki, T.W. How to Interpret Infant Socio-Cognitive Competence. Rev.Phil.Psych. 2, 483–497 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-011-0064-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-011-0064-1