Senju, Atsushi and Southgate, Victoria and Snape, C. and Leonard, M. and Csibra, Gergely (2011) Do 18-month-olds really attribute mental states to others? A critical test. Psychological Science 22 (7), pp. 878-880. ISSN 0956-7976.
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Abstract
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.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Keyword(s) / Subject(s): | theory of mind, infants, eye tracking, social cognition |
| School: | Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Science > School of Psychological Sciences |
| Research Centres and Institutes: | Brain and Cognitive Development, Centre for (CBCD) |
| Depositing User: | Administrator |
| Date Deposited: | 14 Nov 2011 09:30 |
| Last Modified: | 02 Aug 2023 16:56 |
| URI: | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/4358 |
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