Conflict Processing and Inhibition in Infant Theory of Mind

• In Event: Poster Session 04
  In Poster Session: PS 04 Topic - Social Cognition

Abstract

The ability to think about what others know, want, or believe – commonly known as mentalizing or theory of mind – is crucial to human social interaction. Although many years of research in developmental psychology had converged on the conclusion that mentalizing was a developmental achievement reached somewhere between 3 and 4 years of age, a wealth of new data suggests that very young infants are already making inferences about other people’s thoughts. This new data has led to considerable debate, largely centered on whether the behaviour that looks like mentalizing in infants reflects the same underlying processes that enable older children to pass traditional verbal mentalizing tasks (VMTs).

Processes that have gained much attention include conflict monitoring and inhibitory control. According to one influential account, success on VMTs is dependent on children’s ability to inhibit their own salient and conflicting perspective about reality. Thus, children’s success on traditional VMTs around 3-4 years of age may reflect the development of executive abilities, rather than mentalizing per se. In addition, one popular but untested explanation of infants’ precocious success on NVMTs (non-verbal mentalizing tasks) is that these tasks do not demand inhibitory control, and thus enable infants to reveal their belief-tracking ability by removing the need to inhibit their own perspective.

Although there is general support for the idea that executive functions like inhibitory control may be related to false belief understanding in older children, there is not yet evidence that the same processes are required to pass non-verbal mentalizing tasks used in younger infants.

The present study uses eye-tracking and pupillometry to assess whether nonverbal mentalizing tasks require inhibition and examines the relationship between inhibition and belief-based action prediction in 18-month-olds. To test these questions, we will present infants with a novel NVMT and use pupil diameter as an index of conflict processing, and anticipatory looking as a measure of action based on false belief attribution (see Southgate, Senju, & Csibra, 2007). We will manipulate conflict by including a low-demand (LDfb) and a high-demand (HDfb) condition. In the LDfb condition, the object is placed in one box and then removed from the scene while the agent is absent. In the HDfb condition, the object is placed in one box, and then relocated to the other box while the agent is absent. The conflict for the infant is hypothesized to be higher in this second condition because they must ignore the object’s presence in the visible box in order to base their predictions on the agent’s representation of the object in the first box (Wang & Leslie, 2016). The main hypothesis to be tested is that conflict, and thus pupil dilation, will be higher for HDfb than LDfb. Using anticipatory looking (Southgate, 2017), we will measure whether infants correctly anticipate where the agent will search for the ball. We hypothesize that the correlation between inhibition and correct anticipation will be greater for HDfb than for LDfb. Data collection is ongoing and we expect to have data analysis prior to the conference in April.

Authors

• Emanuela Yeung, University of Copenhagen
  Presenting Author

• Victoria Southgate, University of Copenhagen
  Non-Presenting Author