2-056 - Exploring the Nature of Infants’ and Toddlers’ False-belief Reasoning

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Recent evidence suggests that by at least the second year of life, infants possess some understanding of false belief. However, the nature of this understanding is highly controversial. While some argue that infants can attribute false beliefs to agents, others ascribe infants’ success to low-level processes and predict limitations on early false-belief performance. Using a wide variety of methodologies, the presentations in this symposium addressed this debate by exploring the nature of, and potential limits on, early false-belief reasoning.

The symposium consists of four presentations based on research in Germany, Hungary, and the United States. The first presentation used both behavioral and electrophysiological measures to assess whether infants can track false beliefs about numerosity, as well as beliefs about absent objects. The second presentation used an interactive helping paradigm to investigate whether infants succeed in false-belief tasks by reasoning about mental states, behavioral rules, or low-level associations. The third presentation used a violation-of-expectation paradigm to test whether infants are limited to predicting simple belief-based actions or whether they could also predict belief-based emotions. Finally, the fourth presentation used a preferential-looking paradigm to examine whether toddlers’ false-belief understanding supports reasoning about recursion, or second-order false beliefs.

Together, the results from these tasks cast doubt on several different low-level explanations that have been offered for infants’ and toddlers’ performance in false-belief tasks. Instead, these results suggest that infants and toddlers can attribute false beliefs to agents and that, rather than being sharply limited, this understanding is more sophisticated than previously thought.

Sub Unit

• Social Cognition

Chair

• Rose Scott, University of California at Merced

Individual Presentations

• Infants’ Representation of Others’ Beliefs Regarding Multiple Objects, Absence of Objects, and Objects That Ceased to Exist - Presenting Author: Dora Kampis, Central European University; Agnes Melinda Melinda Kovacs, Central European University

• Investigating Infants’ Use of Low-Level Mechanisms to Solve Interactive False-Belief Tasks - Presenting Author: David Buttelmann, University of Erfurt; Susanne Grassmann, Faculty of Education; Frances Buttelmann, Universität Erfurt

• Beyond a Simple Reach: 20-Month-Olds Understand the Emotional Impact of False Beliefs - Presenting Author: Rose Scott, University of California at Merced

• Early Theory of Mind is the Real Deal: Children’s Spontaneous Understanding of Second-Order False Belief - Presenting Author: lu wang, Rutgers University; Alan M Leslie, Rutgers University