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Origins of Mind

Infants Track False Beliefs

Lecturer: Stephen A. Butterfill

Many behaviours exhibited by infants, including anticipatory looking, looking time, pointing and helping activities, show sensitivity to what others believe even when their beliefs are false.

Slides

Notes

For a process to track someone’s belief that p is for it to nonaccidentally depend in some way on whether she believes that p. For someone to track beliefs is for there to be processes in her which track some beliefs.

One-year-old children predict actions of agents with false beliefs about the locations of objects (Clements & Perner, 1994; Onishi & Baillargeon, 2005; Southgate, Senju, & Csibra, 2007),1 and about the contents of containers (He, Bolz, & Baillargeon, 2011), taking into account verbal communication (Song, Onishi, Baillargeon, & Fisher, 2008; Scott et al., 2012). They will also choose ways of helping (Buttelmann, Carpenter, & Tomasello, 2009) and communicating (Knudsen & Liszkowski, 2012; Southgate, Chevallier, & Csibra, 2010) with others depending on whether their beliefs are true or false. And in much the way that irrelevant facts about the contents of others’ beliefs modulate adult subjects’ response times, such facts also affect how long 7-month-old infants look at some stimuli (Kovács, Téglás, & Endress, 2010).

Beyond Replication Issues

A surprising number of findings have turned out to be inexplicably hard to replicate, while other findings have been replicated.2 Even more confusingly, some findings have been both successfully and unsuccessfully replicated (for example, see Kulke & Rakoczy, 2018 on Southgate et al., 2007).

Beyond questions of replication, there are two challenges. First, when various tasks are supposed to measure a single ability, we would normally expect to find signs of convergence in performance across the tasks: that is, those and only those subjects who pass one of these tasks will tend to pass other tasks. Kulke et al. (2017, p. 2) observe that whereas performance on false belief tasks used to test older children is convergent in this sense, there is little evidence of convergence for false belief tasks suitable for infants; and Poulin-Dubois & Yott (2017) find evidence for divergence. Second Wellman (2018, p. 741) notes that in tasks typically used with older children, measures of belief tracking are predictive of social skills, whereas there is as yet little evidence that performance on belief tracking tasks used with infants predicts social abilities.

My Guess

My guess is that even two- and three-year-olds really can track beliefs. I thought there was already a case for this guess twenty years before this course (Butterfill, 2001). And even taking seriously the challenges and the patterns of success and failure in replication studies, on balance the evidence in favour of this guess has grown since then.

Against this Poulin-Dubois et al. (2018) argue that issues with replication prevent us from knowing, at present, whether infants track false beliefs.

References

Buttelmann, D., Carpenter, M., & Tomasello, M. (2009). Eighteen-month-old infants show false belief understanding in an active helping paradigm. Cognition, 112(2), 337–342.
Butterfill, S. A. (2001). Awareness of belief. In A. Beckermann & C. Nimtz (Eds.), Argument & analyse: Ausgewählte sektionsvorträge des 4. Internationalen kongresses der gesellschaft für analytische philosophie (Vol. 2). Bielefeld: Mentis.
Carpenter, M., Call, J., & Tomasello, M. (2002). A new false belief test for 36-month-olds. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 20, 393–420.
Clements, W., & Perner, J. (1994). Implicit understanding of belief. Cognitive Development, 9, 377–395.
Clements, W., Rustin, C., & McCallum, S. (2000). Promoting the transition from implicit to explicit understanding: A training study of false belief. Developmental Science, 3(1), 81–92.
Crivello, C., & Poulin-Dubois, D. (2017). Infants’ false belief understanding: A non-replication of the helping task. Cognitive Development. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogdev.2017.10.003
Dörrenberg, S., Rakoczy, H., & Liszkowski, U. (2018). How (not) to measure infant Theory of Mind: Testing the replicability and validity of four non-verbal measures. Cognitive Development. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogdev.2018.01.001
Garnham, W., & Ruffman, T. (2001). Doesn’t see, doesn’t know: Is anticipatory looking really related to understanding or belief. Developmental Science, 4(1), 94–100.
Happé, F., & Loth, E. (2002). “Theory of mind” and tracking speakers’ intentions. Mind and Language, 17(1–2), 24–36.
He, Z., Bolz, M., & Baillargeon, R. (2011). False-belief understanding in 2.5-year-olds: Evidence from violation-of-expectation change-of-location and unexpected-contents tasks. Developmental Science, 14(2), 292–305.
Kampis, D., Karman, P., Csibra, G., Southgate, V., & Hernik, M. (2020). A two-lab direct replication attempt of Southgate, Senju, & Csibra (2007). https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/gzy26
Knudsen, B., & Liszkowski, U. (2012). 18-Month-Olds predict specific action mistakes through attribution of false belief, not ignorance, and intervene accordingly. Infancy, 17, 672–691. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1532-7078.2011.00105.x
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Kulke, L., Johannsen, J., & Rakoczy, H. (2019). Why can some implicit Theory of Mind tasks be replicated and others cannot? A test of mentalizing versus submentalizing accounts. PLOS ONE, 14(3), e0213772. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0213772
Kulke, L., & Rakoczy, H. (2018). Implicit Theory of Mind  An overview of current replications and non-replications. Data in Brief, 16(Supplement C), 101–104. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dib.2017.11.016
Kulke, L., Reiß, M., Krist, H., & Rakoczy, H. (2017). How robust are anticipatory looking measures of theory of mind? Replication attempts across the life span. Cognitive Development, in press.
Kulke, L., von Duhn, B., Schneider, D., & Rakoczy, H. (2018). Is Implicit Theory of Mind a Real and Robust Phenomenon? Results From a Systematic Replication Study. Psychological Science, 0956797617747090. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797617747090
Onishi, K. H., & Baillargeon, R. (2005). Do 15-month-old infants understand false beliefs? Science, 308(8), 255–258.
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Poulin-Dubois, D., Rakoczy, H., Burnside, K., Crivello, C., Dörrenberg, S., Edwards, K., … Ruffman, T. (2018). Do infants understand false beliefs? We don’t know yet  A commentary on Baillargeon, Buttelmann and Southgate’s commentary. Cognitive Development, 48, 302–315. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogdev.2018.09.005
Poulin-Dubois, D., & Yott, J. (2017). Probing the depth of infants’ theory of mind: Disunity in performance across paradigms. Developmental Science, n/a-n/a. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.12600
Powell, L. J., Hobbs, K., Bardis, A., Carey, S., & Saxe, R. (2017). Replications of implicit theory of mind tasks with varying representational demands. Cognitive Development. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogdev.2017.10.004
Ruffman, T., Garnham, W., Import, A., & Connolly, D. (2001). Does eye gaze indicate implicit knowledge of false belief? Charting transitions in knowledge. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 80, 201–224.
Scott, R. M., He, Z., Baillargeon, R., Cummins, D., Scott, R. M., He, Z., … Cummins, D. (2012). False-belief understanding in 2.5-year-olds: Evidence from two novel verbal spontaneous-response tasks. Developmental Science, 15(2), 181–193. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7687.2011.01103.x, 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2011.01103.x
Song, H., Onishi, K. H., Baillargeon, R., & Fisher, C. (2008). Can an agent’s false belief be corrected by an appropriate communication? Psychological reasoning in 18-month-old infants. Cognition, 109(3), 295–315.
Southgate, V., Chevallier, C., & Csibra, G. (2010). Seventeen-month-olds appeal to false beliefs to interpret others’ referential communication. Developmental Science, 13(6), 907–912. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7687.2009.00946.x
Southgate, V., Senju, A., & Csibra, G. (2007). Action anticipation through attribution of false belief by two-year-olds. Psychological Science, 18(7), 587–592.
Wellman, H. M. (2018). Theory of mind: The state of the art. European Journal of Developmental Psychology, 15(6), 728–755. https://doi.org/10.1080/17405629.2018.1435413

Endnotes

  1. Some of these studies have proven difficult to replicate, or have been challenged in other ways. For example, Kampis, Karman, Csibra, Southgate, & Hernik (2020) failed to replicate Southgate et al. (2007). Kulke, Johannsen, & Rakoczy (2019, p. 14) suggest that anticipatory looking, may not be reliable indicators of belief tracking at all. ↩

  2. See, for example, Kulke, Reiß, Krist, & Rakoczy (2017), Kulke & Rakoczy (2018), Kulke, von Duhn, Schneider, & Rakoczy (2018), Powell, Hobbs, Bardis, Carey, & Saxe (2017), Crivello & Poulin-Dubois (2017) and Dörrenberg, Rakoczy, & Liszkowski (2018). ↩