Do 18-month-olds really attribute mental states to others? A critical test

Atsushi Senju, Victoria Southgate, Charlotte Snape, Mark Leonard, Gergely Csibra

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract (may include machine translation)

In the research reported here, we investigated whether 18-month-olds would use their own past experience of visual access to attribute perception and consequent beliefs to other people. Infants in this study wore either opaque blindfolds (opaque condition) or trick blindfolds that looked opaque but were actually transparent (trick condition). Then both groups of infants observed an actor wearing one of the same blindfolds that they themselves had experienced, while a puppet removed an object from its location. Anticipatory eye movements revealed that infants who had experienced opaque blindfolds expected the actor to behave in accordance with a false belief about the object's location, but that infants who had experienced trick blindfolds did not exhibit that expectation. Our results suggest that 18-month-olds used self-experience with the blindfolds to assess the actor's visual access and to update her belief state accordingly. These data constitute compelling evidence that 18-month-olds infer perceptual access and appreciate its causal role in altering the epistemic states of other people.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)878-880
Number of pages3
JournalPsychological Science
Volume22
Issue number7
DOIs
StatePublished - Jul 2011

Keywords

  • eye tracking
  • infants
  • social cognition
  • theory of mind

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