Probing the depth of infants’ theory of mind: disunity in performance across paradigms

• Published in: Developmental science Vol. 21; no. 4; pp. e12600 - n/a
• Main Authors: Poulin‐Dubois, Diane, Yott, Jessica
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: England Wiley-Blackwell 01.07.2018; Wiley Subscription Services, Inc
• Subjects: Aptitude; Attention; Beliefs; Child; Children; Cognition; Cognitive Ability; Comparative Analysis; Comprehension; Correlation; Female; Humans; Infant; Infants; Intention; Interaction; Male; Motivation; Psychological Patterns; Reproducibility of Results; Social Perception; Task Analysis; Task Performance and Analysis; Theory of Mind; Theory of Mind - physiology; Validity
• ISSN: 1363-755X; 1467-7687; 1467-7687
• DOI: 10.1111/desc.12600

There is currently a hot debate in the literature regarding whether or not infants have a true theory of mind (ToM) understanding. According to the mentalistic view, infants possess the same false belief understanding that older children have but their competence is masked by task demands. On the other hand, others have proposed that preverbal infants are incapable of mental state attribution and simply respond to superficial features of the events in spontaneous‐responses tasks. In the current study, we aimed to clarify the nature of infants’ performance in tasks designed to assess implicit theory of mind (ToM) by adopting a within‐subject design that involved testing 18‐month‐old infants on two batteries of tasks measuring the same four ToM constructs (intention, desire, true belief, and false belief). One battery included tasks based on the violation‐of‐ expectation (VOE) procedure, whereas the other set of tasks was based on the interactive, helping procedure. Replication of the original findings varied across tasks, due to methodological changes and the use of a within‐subject design. Convergent validity was examined by comparing performance on VOE and interactive tasks that are considered to be measures of the same theory of mind concept. The results revealed no significant relations between performance on the pairs of tasks for any of the four ToM constructs measured. This pattern of results is discussed in terms of current conflicting accounts of infants’ performance on implicit ToM tasks. A video of this article can be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3vqfe_zdhA&feature=youtu.be Most published articles on infant ToM have argued for a relatively sophisticated understanding of mental states in infants. To understand the depth of infants’ theory of mind, we compared 18‐month‐olds’ performance across pairs of tasks that measured the same concept. Unlike what has been reported in older children with elicited‐response tasks, no convergence in performance across tasks was apparent.