3-224 - The Nature of Infants' and Preschoolers' Sensitivity to Other People's Object-representations

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

The fundamentals of object cognition develop during the first few years of life as children try to track and remember the identities of individual objects. In parallel to this, young children also try to track and represent other people’s mental states, including their representations of objects. This symposium brings together these hitherto independent lines of research in talks that explore questions from agent’s representations of object identity in infants to learning proper names and ownership in young preschoolers.
The first presentation studies infants’ tracking of multiple, sequentially hidden objects in relation to whether an agent’s choices in a search task would be guided by the infant’s own object representations or by that agent’s (incomplete) object representation. The second talk uses a different manual search task to explore how infants’ own object tracking interacts with their representations of others’ beliefs about the numerical identity of objects. The third talk uses a labeling task to study whether young preschoolers can learn a proper name by correcting for a speaker’s false belief about object identities. The final paper goes on to explore preschoolers’ understanding of ownership and investigates development of their awareness that certain mental states are specific to particular objects.
This symposium extends our understanding of both early object cognition and theory of mind, suggesting new ways in which these lines of research can come together. The findings set new challenges of existing accounts and point to ways in which the physical and social worlds interact in the developing preschool mind.

Sub Unit

• Social Cognition

Chair

• Alan Miller Leslie, Rutgers University, NJ

Individual Presentations

• Infants use Others' (Incomplete) Representations Instead of Their own to Track Multiple Occluded Objects - Presenting Author: Melissa M. Kibbe, Boston University; Non-Presenting Author: Jessica R. Beal, Boston University

• Object Tracking and Belief Representations in Infants and Preschoolers - Presenting Author: Dora Kampis, University of Copenhagen

• Acquiring a Proper Name by Correcting for the Speaker's False-belief About Identity - Presenting Author: Gala Stojnic, Rutgers University, NJ; Non-Presenting Author: Alan Miller Leslie, Rutgers University, NJ

• Children can Recognize That Feelings-of-ownership are Specific to Particular Objects - Non-Presenting Author: Angelina Cleroux, University of Waterloo; Presenting Author: Ori Friedman, University of Waterloo