Self-experience as a mechanism for learning about others: a training study in social cognition

Is self-awareness necessary to have a theory of mind?

Forty years ago, Gallup proposed that theory of mind presupposes self-awareness. Following Humphrey, his hypothesis was that individuals can infer the mental states of others thanks to the ability to monitor their own mental states in similar circumstances. Since then, advances in several disciplines, such as comparative and developmental psychology, have provided empirical evidence to test Gallup's hypothesis. Herein, we review and discuss this evidence.

Dogs do not use their own experience with novel barriers to infer others' visual access

Despite extensive research into the Theory of Mind abilities in non-human animals, it remains controversial whether they can attribute mental states to other individuals or whether they merely predict future behaviour based on previous behavioural cues. In the present study, we tested pet dogs (in total, N = 92) on adaptations of the 'goggles test' previously used with human infants and great apes. In both a cooperative and a competitive task, dogs were given direct experience with the properties of novel screens (one opaque, the other transparent) inserted into identical, but differently coloured, tunnels. Dogs learned and remembered the properties of the screens even when, later on, these were no longer directly visible to them. Nevertheless, they were not more likely to follow the experimenter's gaze to a target object when the experimenter could see it through the transparent screen. Further, they did not prefer to steal a forbidden treat first in a location obstructed from the experimenter's view by the opaque screen. Therefore, dogs did not show perspective-taking abilities in this study in which the only available cue to infer others' visual access consisted of the subjects' own previous experience with novel visual barriers. We conclude that the behaviour of our dogs, unlike that of infants and apes in previous studies, does not show evidence of experience-projection abilities.

Uncomfortable staring? Gaze to other people in social situations is inhibited in both infants and adults

People attract infants' and adults' gaze when presented on a computer screen. However, in live social situations, adults inhibit their gaze at strangers to avoid sending inappropriate social signals. Such inhibition of gaze has never been directly investigated in infants. The current preregistered study measured gaze and neural responses (EEG alpha power) to a confederate in a live social situation compared to a video of this confederate. Adults looked less at the live confederate than at the video of the confederate, although their neural responses suggest that they were overall equally attentive in both situations. Infants also looked less at the live confederate than at the video of the confederate, with similar neural response patterns. The gaze difference between live social and video situations increased with age. The study shows that young infants are already sensitive to social context and show decreased gaze to strangers in social situations. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: This study shows that infants and adults look more at a video of a stranger than at a stranger that is present live in a social situation. Neural responses suggest that adults are equally attentive in both live and video situations but inhibit their gaze at the stranger in live social situations. Infants show a similar pattern of shorter gaze at a stranger who is present in person than at a video of this stranger. The study shows that gaze in infants and adults may diverge from cognitive processes measured through EEG, highlighting the importance of combining behavioural and neural measures in natural interactions.

Neural correlates of theory of mind reasoning in congenitally blind children

Vision is an important source of information about other minds for sighted children, especially prior to the onset of language. Visually observed actions, eye gaze, and facial expressions of others provide information about mental states, such as beliefs, desires, and emotions. Does such experience contribute causally to the development of cortical networks supporting social cognition? To address this question we compared functional development of brain regions supporting theory of mind (ToM), as well as behavioral ToM reasoning, across congenitally blind (n=17) and sighted (n=114) children and adolescents (4-17 years old). We find that blind children in this age range show slightly lower ToM behavioral performance relative to sighted children. Likewise, the functional profile of ToM brain regions is qualitatively similar, but quantitatively weaker in blind relative to sighted children. Alongside prior research, these data suggest that vision facilitates, but is not necessary for, ToM development.

Caregiver-reported development in term and preterm infants from birth to nine months of age: Psychometrics of the PediaTracTM social/communication/cognition domain

Term and preterm neonates were assessed at the newborn (NB) period (term, term equivalent) and at 2, 4, 6, and 9 months in a study of the psychometric properties of the Social/Communication/Cognition (SCG) domain of PediaTrac™ v3.0, a novel caregiver-based developmental monitoring instrument. Item response theory (IRT) was used to model item parameters and estimate theta, an index of the latent trait, social/communication/cognition. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was conducted to further clarify the dimensionality of the domain. In a cohort of 571 caregiver-infant dyads (331 term, 240 preterm), mean theta values could be reliably estimated at all time periods, with term infants demonstrating significantly more advanced social/communication/cognition abilities at 9 months of age. Item discrimination and item difficulty of the 15, 15, 35, 47, and 57 items at the NB, 2-, 4-, 6-, and 9-month periods, respectively, could be reliably modeled across the range of ability. Total Information for the SCG domain was high and the reliability ranged from 0.97 to 0.99 (NB = .98, 2 month = .97, 4 month = .98, 6 month = .99 and 9 month = .99). EFA revealed second-order factors at each time period, with two factors at the NB period (affect/emotional expression, social responsiveness) accounting for 43% of variance; three factors at 2, 4, and 6 months (affect/emotional expression, social responsiveness imitation/emerging communication), accounting for 43%, 34%, and 34% of the variance, respectively; and four factors at 9 months (imitation/communication, nonverbal/gestural communication, affect expression, and social responsiveness), accounting for 34% of the variance. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

The socialization of modality capital in sign language ecologies: A classroom example

Gaze behavior is an important component of children’s language, cognitive, and sociocultural development. This is especially true for young deaf children acquiring a signed language—if they are not looking at the language model, they are not getting linguistic input. Deaf caregivers engage their deaf infants and toddlers using visual and tactile strategies to draw in, support, and promote their child’s visual attention; we argue that these caregiver actions create a developmental niche that establishes the visual modality capital their child needs for successful sign language learning. But most deaf children do not have deaf signing parents (reportedly over 90%) and they will need to rely on adult signing teachers if they are to acquire a signed language at an early age. This study examines classroom interactions between a Deaf teacher, her teacher’s aide, and six deaf preschoolers to document the teachers’ “everyday practices” as they socialize the gaze behavior of these children. Utilizing a detailed behavioral and linguistic analysis of two video-recorded book-sharing contexts, we present data summarizing the teacher’s attention-getting actions directed toward the children and the discourse-embedded cues that signal the teacher’s expectations for student participation in the signed conversation. We observed that the teacher’s behaviors differed according to the parent status of the deaf preschooler (Deaf parents vs. hearing parents) suggesting that Deaf children of Deaf parents arrive to the preschool classroom with well-developed self-regulation of their attention or gaze. The teachers also used more physical and explicit cueing with the deaf children of hearing parents—possibly to promote their ability to leverage the visual modality for sign language acquisition. We situate these socialization patterns within a framework that integrates notions of intuitive or indigenous practices, developmental niche, and modality capital. Implications for early childhood deaf education are also discussed.

Imagination and social cognition in childhood

Imagination is a cognitive process used to generate new ideas from old, not just in the service of creativity and fantasy, but also in our ordinary thoughts about alternatives to current reality. In this article, I argue for the central function of imagination in the development of social cognition in infancy and childhood. In Section 1, I review a work showing that even in the first year of life, social cognition can be viewed through a nascent ability to imagine the physical possibilities and physical limits on action. In Section 2, I discuss how imagination of what should happen is appropriately constrained by what can happen, and how this influences children's moral evaluations. In the final section, I suggest developmental changes in imagination—especially the ability to imagine improbable events—may have implications for social inference, leading children to learn that inner motives can conflict. These examples point to a flexible and domain‐general process that operates on knowledge to make social meaning.

This article is categorized under:

Psychology > Development and Aging

Cognitive Biology > Cognitive Development

Philosophy > Knowledge and Belief

Knowledge in Sight: Toddlers Plan Efficient Epistemic Actions by Anticipating Learning Gains

Anticipating the learning consequences of actions is crucial to plan efficient information seeking. Such a capacity is needed for learners to determine which actions are most likely to result in learning. Here, we tested the early ontogeny of the human capacity to anticipate the amount of learning gained from seeing. In study 1, we tested infants' capacity to anticipate the availability of sight. Fourteen-month-old infants (N = 72) were invited to search for a toy hidden inside a container. The participants were faster to attempt at opening a shutter when this action allowed them to see inside the container. Moreover, this effect was specifically observed when seeing inside the container was potentially useful to the participants' goals. Thus, infants anticipated the availability of sight, and they calibrated their information-seeking behaviors accordingly. In studies 2 and 3, we tested toddlers' capacity to anticipate whether data would be cognitively useful for their goals. Two-and-a-half-year-olds (N = 72) had to locate a target character hidden among distractors. The participants flipped the characters more often, and were comparatively faster to initiate this action when it yielded access to visual data allowing them to locate the target. Thus, toddlers planned their information-seeking behaviors by anticipating the cognitive utility of sight. In contrast, toddlers did not calibrate their behaviors to the cognitive usefulness of auditory data. These results suggest that cognitive models of learning guide toddlers' search for information. The early developmental onset of the capacity to anticipate future learning gains is crucial for active learning.

On the Working Memory of Humans and Great Apes: Strikingly Similar or Remarkably Different?

In this article we review publications relevant to addressing widely reported claims in both the academic and popular press that chimpanzees working memory (WM) is comparable to, if not exceeding, that of humans. WM is a complex multidimensional construct with strong parallels in humans to prefrontal cortex and cognitive development. These parallels occur in chimpanzees, but to a lesser degree. We review empirical evidence and conclude that the size of WM in chimpanzees is 2 ± 1 versus Miller's famous 7 ± 2 in humans. Comparable differences occur in experiments on chimpanzees relating to strategic and attentional WM subsystems. Regardless of the domain, chimpanzee WM performance is comparable to that of humans around the age of 4 or 5. Next, we review evidence showing parallels among the evolution of WM capacity in hominins ancestral to Homo sapiens, the phylogenetic evolution of hominins leading to Homo sapiens, and evolution in the complexity of stone tool technology over this time period.

What Can We Learn by Treating Perspective Taking as Problem Solving?

Perspective taking has been studied extensively using a wide variety of experimental tasks. The theoretical constructs that are used to develop these tasks and interpret the results obtained from them, most notably theory of mind (ToM), have conceptual shortcomings from a behavior-analytic perspective. The behavioral approach to conceptualizing and studying this class of behavior is parsimonious and pragmatic, but the body of relevant research is currently small. The prominent relational frame theory (RFT) approach to derived perspective taking asserts that "deictic framing" is a core component of this class of behavior, but this proposal also appears to be conceptually problematic. We suggest that in many cases perspective taking is problem solving; when successful, both classes of behavior involve the emission of context-appropriate precurrent behavior that facilitates the appropriate response (i.e., the "solution"). Conceptualizing perspective taking in this way appears to have many advantages, which we explore herein.

An interactionist perspective on the development of coordinated social attention

Infants' ability to coordinate their attention with other people develops profoundly across the first year of life. Mainly based on experimental research focusing on infants' behavior under highly controlled conditions, developmental milestones were identified and explained in the past by prominent theories in terms of the onset of specific cognitive skills. In contrast to this approach, recent longitudinal research challenges this perspective with findings suggesting that social attention develops continuously with a gradual refinement of skills. Informed by these findings, we argue for an interactionist and dynamical systems view that bases observable advances in infant social attention skills on increasingly fine-tuned mutual adjustments in the caregiver-infant dyad, resulting in gradually improving mutual prediction. We present evidence for this view from recent studies leveraging new technologies which afford the opportunity to dynamically track social interactions in real-time. These new technically-sophisticated studies offer unprecedented insights into the dynamic processes of infant-caregiver social attention. It is now possible to track in much greater detail fluctuations over time with regard to object-directed attention as well as social attention and how these processes relate to one another. Encouraged by these initial results and new insights from this interactionist developmental social neuroscience approach, we conclude with a "call to action" in which we advocate for more ecologically valid paradigms for studying social attention as a dynamic and bi-directional process.

Relational Factors in Pragmatic Skill Development: Deaf and Hard of Hearing Infants and Toddlers

In this article, we review relational factors in early childhood believed to contribute in unique ways to pragmatic skill development in deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) infants and toddlers. These factors include attending to infant interactions with caregivers and others, supporting development of theory of mind through play and use of mental state language (ie, describing one's own or others' thoughts, feelings, and beliefs), and providing accessible opportunities for social interaction. On the basis of a review of the literature and clinical experience, we offer prescriptive strategies for supporting DHH children's development in these areas. To improve outcomes for DHH children, medical care providers and allied health professionals have a responsibility to support the development of young DHH children's pragmatic abilities by understanding these variables, coaching caregivers regarding their importance, and facilitating referrals for support when necessary.

Importance of body representations in social-cognitive development: New insights from infant brain science

There is significant interest in the ways the human body, both one's own and that of others, is represented in the human brain. In this chapter we focus on body representations in infancy and synthesize relevant findings from both infant cognitive neuroscience and behavioral experiments. We review six experiments in infant neuroscience that have used novel EEG and MEG methods to explore infant neural body maps. We then consider results from behavioral studies of social imitation and examine what they contribute to our understanding of infant body representations at a psychological level. Finally, we interweave both neuroscience and behavioral lines of research to ground new theoretical claims about early infant social cognition. We propose, based on the evidence, that young infants can represent the bodily acts of others and their own bodily acts in commensurate terms. Infants initially recognize correspondences between self and other-they perceive that others are "like me" in terms of bodies and bodily actions. This capacity for registering and using self-other equivalence mappings has far-reaching implications for mechanisms of developmental change. Infants can learn about the affordances and powers of their own body by watching adults' actions and their causal consequences. Reciprocally, infants can enrich their understanding of other people's internal states by taking into account the way they themselves feel when they perform similar acts. The faces, bodies, and matching actions of people are imbued with unique meaning because they can be mapped to the infant's own body and behavior.

Do Non-Human Primates Really Represent Others' Beliefs?

Over two decades of research have produced compelling evidence that non-human primates understand some psychological states in other individuals but are unable to represent others' beliefs. Recently, three studies employing anticipatory looking (AL) paradigms reported that non-human primates do show hints of implicitly understanding the beliefs of others. However, measures of AL have been increasingly scrutinized in the human literature owing to extensive replication problems. We argue that new reports of belief representation in non-human primates using AL should be interpreted cautiously because of methodological and theoretical challenges paralleling trends in the human literature. We explore how future work can address these challenges, and conclude by identifying new evolutionary questions raised by the prospect that non-human primates implicitly represent others' beliefs without an explicit belief representation system that guides fitness-relevant behavior.

Neural correlates of infant action processing relate to theory of mind in early childhood

The mechanisms that support infant action processing are thought to be involved in the development of later social cognition. While a growing body of research demonstrates longitudinal links between action processing and explicit theory of mind (TOM), it remains unclear why this link emerges in some measures of action encoding and not others. In this paper, we recruit neural measures as a unique lens into which aspects of human infant action processing (i.e., action encoding and action execution; age 7 months) are related to preschool TOM (age 3 years; n = 31). We test whether individual differences in recruiting the sensorimotor system or attention processes during action encoding predict individual differences in TOM. Results indicate that reduced occipital alpha during action encoding predicts TOM at age 3. This finding converges with behavioral work and suggests that attentional processes involved in action encoding may support TOM. We also test whether neural processing during action execution draws on the proto-substrates of effortful control (EC). Results indicate that frontal alpha oscillatory activity during action execution predicted EC at age 3-providing strong novel evidence that infant brain activity is longitudinally linked to EC. Further, we demonstrate that EC mediates the link between the frontal alpha response and TOM. This indirect effect is specific in terms of direction, neural response, and behavior. Together, these findings converge with behavioral research and demonstrate that domain general processes show strong links to early infant action processing and TOM.

Actions Speak Louder Than Words: The Role of Action in Self-Referential Advantage in Children With Autism

Impaired self-processing in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is believed to be closely associated with social-communicative deficits, a core symptom of ASD. In three experiments, we aimed to investigate (a) whether children with ASD exhibited deficient in self-processing, as reflected by their superior memory for self-related items as compared to other-related items, and (b) the role that action played in promoting self-processing in ASD. In Experiment 1, children with ASD, children with intellectual disability (ID), and typically developing children were asked to memorize items on the cards assigned to them or to the experimenter. The results indicated that the TD and ID groups had a self-referential memory advantage, but the ASD group did not. Experiments 2 and 3 examined whether the deficit in self-processing among children with ASDs was ameliorated when participants performed or observed an action to indicate the ownership of the items. We found that when children with ASD performed self-generated actions or observed virtual actions, they displayed a similar self-referential memory advantage as the other two groups. Our findings reveal that action plays an important role in the self-processing in children with ASD, and thereby contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of self-processing deficits in this population. Autism Res 2020, 13: 810-820. © 2020 International Society for Autism Research,Wiley Periodicals, Inc. LAY SUMMARY: We aimed to study whether children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) exhibited deficient in self-processing and the role of action in promoting self-processing in ASD. We found that the typically developing and intellectual disability groups had a self-referential memory advantage, but the ASD group did not. However, children with ASD showed a significant self-referential advantage when they performed or observed an action to indicate the ownership of items. These findings highlight the vital role that action plays in cognitively enhancing their self-processing.

Systematic Review and Inventory of Theory of Mind Measures for Young Children

Theory of mind (TOM), the ability to infer mental states to self and others, has been a pervasive research theme across many disciplines including developmental, educational, neuro-, and social psychology, social neuroscience and speech therapy. TOM abilities have been consistently linked to markers of social adaptation and have been shown to be affected in a broad range of clinical conditions. Despite the wealth and breadth of research dedicated to TOM, identifying appropriate assessment tools for young children remains challenging. This systematic review presents an inventory of TOM measures for children aged 0-5 years and provides details on their content and characteristics. Electronic databases (1983-2019) and 9 test publisher catalogs were systematically reviewed. In total, 220 measures, identified within 830 studies, were found to assess the understanding of seven categories of mental states and social situations: emotions, desires, intentions, percepts, knowledge, beliefs and mentalistic understanding of non-literal communication, and pertained to 39 types of TOM sub-abilities. Information on the measures' mode of presentation, number of items, scoring options, and target populations were extracted, and psychometric details are listed in summary tables. The results of the systematic review are summarized in a visual framework "Abilities in Theory of Mind Space" (ATOMS) which provides a new taxonomy of TOM sub-domains. This review highlights the remarkable variety of measures that have been created to assess TOM, but also the numerous methodological and psychometric challenges associated with developing and choosing appropriate measures, including issues related to the limited range of sub-abilities targeted, lack of standardization across studies and paucity of psychometric information provided.

Enhanced gaze-following behavior in Deaf infants of Deaf parents

Gaze following plays a role in parent-infant communication and is a key mechanism by which infants acquire information about the world from social input. Gaze following in Deaf infants has been understudied. Twelve Deaf infants of Deaf parents (DoD) who had native exposure to American Sign Language (ASL) were gender-matched and age-matched (±7 days) to 60 spoken-language hearing control infants. Results showed that the DoD infants had significantly higher gaze-following scores than the hearing infants. We hypothesize that in the absence of auditory input, and with support from ASL-fluent Deaf parents, infants become attuned to visual-communicative signals from other people, which engenders increased gaze following. These findings underscore the need to revise the 'deficit model' of deafness. Deaf infants immersed in natural sign language from birth are better at understanding the signals and identifying the referential meaning of adults' gaze behavior compared to hearing infants not exposed to sign language. Broader implications for theories of social-cognitive development are discussed. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at https://youtu.be/QXCDK_CUmAI.

Great apes use self-experience to anticipate an agent's action in a false-belief test

Human social life depends on theory of mind, the ability to attribute mental states to oneself and others. A signature of theory of mind, false belief understanding, requires representing others' views of the world, even when they conflict with one's own. After decades of research, it remains controversial whether any nonhuman species possess a theory of mind. One challenge to positive evidence of animal theory of mind, the behavior-rule account, holds that animals solve such tasks by responding to others' behavioral cues rather than their mental states. We distinguish these hypotheses by implementing a version of the "goggles" test, which asks whether, in the absence of any additional behavioral cues, animals can use their own self-experience of a novel barrier being translucent or opaque to determine whether another agent can see through the same barrier. We incorporated this paradigm into an established anticipatory-looking false-belief test for great apes. In a between-subjects design, apes experienced a novel barrier as either translucent or opaque, although both looked identical from afar. While being eye tracked, all apes then watched a video in which an actor saw an object hidden under 1 of 2 identical boxes. The actor then scuttled behind the novel barrier, at which point the object was relocated and then removed. Only apes who experienced the barrier as opaque visually anticipated that the actor would mistakenly search for the object in its previous location. Great apes, therefore, appeared to attribute differential visual access based specifically on their own past perceptual experience to anticipate an agent's actions in a false-belief test.

Experience-Projection Methods in Theory-of-Mind Research: Their Limits and Strengths

The capacity to predict the behavior of other individuals is vital to the well-being and reproductive success of many species. There are two main strategies animals can use to make such predictions: (a) infer from observable cues that another agent is in a mental state and use this information to predict the agent’s behavior or (b) use the observable cues alone to predict the agent’s behavior. The first strategy is called theory of mind, the second behavior reading. A long-standing methodological issue has been how to determine experimentally whether animals use theory of mind or behavior reading to predict others’ behavior. One experimental method, called experience projection, may be capable of resolving this issue.

How children come to understand false beliefs: A shared intentionality account

To predict and explain the behavior of others, one must understand that their actions are determined not by reality but by their beliefs about reality. Classically, children come to understand beliefs, including false beliefs, at about 4-5 y of age, but recent studies using different response measures suggest that even infants (and apes!) have some skills as well. Resolving this discrepancy is not possible with current theories based on individual cognition. Instead, what is needed is an account recognizing that the key processes in constructing an understanding of belief are social and mental coordination with other persons and their (sometimes conflicting) perspectives. Engaging in such social and mental coordination involves species-unique skills and motivations of shared intentionality, especially as they are manifest in joint attention and linguistic communication, as well as sophisticated skills of executive function to coordinate the different perspectives involved. This shared intentionality account accords well with documented differences in the cognitive capacities of great apes and human children, and it explains why infants and apes pass some versions of false-belief tasks whereas only older children pass others.

In the beginning: A review of Robert C. Berwick and Noam Chomsky's Why Only Us

We review Berwick and Chomsky's Why Only Us, Language and Evolution, a book premised on language as an instrument primarily of thought, only secondarily of communication. The authors conclude that a Universal Grammar can be reduced to three biologically isolated components, whose computational system for syntax was the result of a single mutation that occurred about 80,000 years ago. We question that argument because it ignores the origin of words, even though Berwick and Chomsky acknowledge that words evolved before grammar. It also fails to explain what evolutionary problem language uniquely solved (Wallace's question). To answer that question, we review recent discoveries about the ontogeny and phylogeny of words. Ontogenetically, two modes of nonverbal relation between infant and mother begin at or within 6 months of birth that are crucial antecedents of the infant's first words: intersubjectivity and joint attention. Intersubjectivity refers to rhythmic shared affect between infant and caretaker(s) that develop during the first 6 months. When the infant begins to crawl, they begin to attend jointly to environmental objects. Phylogenetically, Hrdy and Bickerton describe aspects of Homo erectus' ecology and cognition that facilitated the evolution of words. Hrdy shows how cooperative breeding established trust between infant and caretakers, laying the groundwork for a community of mutual trust among adults. Bickerton shows how 'confrontational scavenging' led to displaced reference, whereby an individual communicated the nature of a dead animal and its location to members of the group that could not see it. Thus, both phylogenetically and ontogenetically, the original function of language was primarily an instrument of communication. Rejecting Berwick and Chomsky's answer to Wallace's question that syntax afforded better planning and inference, we endorse Bickerton's view that language enabled speakers to refer to objects not immediately present. Thus arose context-free mental representations, unique to human language and thought.

Eye tracking uncovered great apes' ability to anticipate that other individuals will act according to false beliefs

Using a novel eye-tracking test, we recently showed that great apes anticipate that other individuals will act according to false beliefs. This finding suggests that, like humans, great apes understand others' false beliefs, at least in an implicit way. One key question raised by our study is why apes have passed our tests but not previous ones. In this article, we consider this question by detailing the development of our task. We considered 3 major differences in our task compared with the previous ones. First, we monitored apes' eye movements, and specifically their anticipatory looks, to measure their predictions about how agents will behave. Second, we adapted our design from an anticipatory-looking false belief test originally developed for human infants. Third, we developed novel test scenarios that were specifically designed to capture the attention of our ape participants. We then discuss how each difference may help explain differences in performance on our task and previous ones, and finally propose some directions for future studies.

Experience matters: Dogs (Canis familiaris) infer physical properties of objects from movement clues

Reasoning about physical properties of objects such as heaviness by observing others' actions toward them is important and useful for adapting to the environment. In this study, we asked whether domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) can use a human's action to infer a physical property of target objects. In Experiment 1, dogs watched an experimenter opening two differently loaded swinging doors with different corresponding degrees of effort, and then were allowed to open one of the doors. Dogs chose randomly between the two doors. In Experiment 2, we gave new dogs the same test as in Experiment 1, but only after giving them experience of opening the doors by themselves, so that they already knew that the doors could be either light or heavy. In this test the dogs reliably chose the light door. These results indicate that dogs are able to infer physical characteristics of objects from the latters' movement caused by human action, but that this inferential reasoning requires direct own experience of the objects.

Children's Representation and Imitation of Events: How Goal Organization Influences 3-Year-Old Children's Memory for Action Sequences

Children's imitation of adults plays a prominent role in human cognitive development. However, few studies have investigated how children represent the complex structure of observed actions which underlies their imitation. We integrate theories of action segmentation, memory, and imitation to investigate whether children's event representation is organized according to veridical serial order or a higher level goal structure. Children were randomly assigned to learn novel event sequences either through interactive hands-on experience (Study 1) or via storybook (Study 2). Results demonstrate that children's representation of observed actions is organized according to higher level goals, even at the cost of representing the veridical temporal ordering of the sequence. We argue that prioritizing goal structure enhances event memory, and that this mental organization is a key mechanism of social-cognitive development in real-world, dynamic environments. It supports cultural learning and imitation in ecologically valid settings when social agents are multitasking and not demonstrating one isolated goal at a time.

The psychology of primate cooperation and competition: a call for realigning research agendas

Cooperation and competition are two key components of social life. Current research agendas investigating the psychological underpinnings of competition and cooperation in non-human primates are misaligned. The majority of work on competition has been done in the context of theory of mind and deception, while work on cooperation has mostly focused on collaboration and helping. The current impression that theory of mind is not necessarily implicated in cooperative activities and that helping could not be an integral part of competition might therefore be rather misleading. Furthermore, theory of mind research has mainly focused on cognitive aspects like the type of stimuli controlling responses, the nature of representation and how those representations are acquired, while collaboration and helping have focused primarily on motivational aspects like prosociality, common goals and a sense of justice and other-regarding concerns. We present the current state of these two bodies of research paying special attention to how they have developed and diverged over the years. We propose potential directions to realign the research agendas to investigate the psychological underpinnings of cooperation and competition in primates and other animals.

I know you see it wrong! Children use others' false perceptions to predict their behaviors

Research on children's ability to attribute false mental states to others has focused exclusively on false beliefs. We developed a novel paradigm that focuses instead on another type of false mental state: false perceptions. From approximately 4years of age, children begin to recognize that their perception of an illusory object can be at odds with its true properties. Our question was whether they also recognize that another individual viewing the object will similarly experience a false perception. We tested 33 preschool children with a task in which distorting lenses caused a small object to appear large and a large object to appear small. To succeed, children needed to recognize that a naive agent would falsely perceive the relative size of the objects and to correctly anticipate the agent's actions on that basis. Children performed significantly better than chance in our false perception test, and there was a developmental progression in performance from 4 to 5years of age similar to that seen in standard false belief tests. Our findings demonstrate that preschool children are capable of understanding that other individuals will be perceptually misled by illusory objects and that these false perceptions will influence their actions in predictable ways.

Animal mindreading: what's the problem?

Research on mindreading in animals has the potential to address fundamental questions about the nature and origins of the human capacity to ascribe mental states, but it is a research programme that seems to be in trouble. Between 1978 and 2000 several groups used a range of methods, some with considerable promise, to ask whether animals can understand a variety of mental states. Since that time, many enthusiasts have become sceptics, empirical methods have become more limited, and it is no longer clear what research on animal mindreading is trying to find. In this article I suggest that the problems are theoretical and methodological: there is difficulty in conceptualising alternatives to 'full-blown' mindreading, and reluctance to use the kinds of empirical methods necessary to distinguish mindreading from other psychological mechanisms. I also suggest ways of tackling the theoretical and methodological problems that draw on recent studies of mindreading in humans, and the resources of experimental psychology more generally. In combination with the use of inanimate control stimuli, species that are unlikely to be capable of mindreading, and the 'goggles method', these approaches could restore both vigour and rigour to research on animal mindreading.

A Bayesian Developmental Approach to Robotic Goal-Based Imitation Learning

A fundamental challenge in robotics today is building robots that can learn new skills by observing humans and imitating human actions. We propose a new Bayesian approach to robotic learning by imitation inspired by the developmental hypothesis that children use self-experience to bootstrap the process of intention recognition and goal-based imitation. Our approach allows an autonomous agent to: (i) learn probabilistic models of actions through self-discovery and experience, (ii) utilize these learned models for inferring the goals of human actions, and (iii) perform goal-based imitation for robotic learning and human-robot collaboration. Such an approach allows a robot to leverage its increasing repertoire of learned behaviors to interpret increasingly complex human actions and use the inferred goals for imitation, even when the robot has very different actuators from humans. We demonstrate our approach using two different scenarios: (i) a simulated robot that learns human-like gaze following behavior, and (ii) a robot that learns to imitate human actions in a tabletop organization task. In both cases, the agent learns a probabilistic model of its own actions, and uses this model for goal inference and goal-based imitation. We also show that the robotic agent can use its probabilistic model to seek human assistance when it recognizes that its inferred actions are too uncertain, risky, or impossible to perform, thereby opening the door to human-robot collaboration.

Emotional experience in music fosters 18-month-olds' emotion-action understanding: a training study

We examine whether emotional experiences induced via music-making promote infants' use of emotional cues to predict others' action. Fifteen-month-olds were randomly assigned to participate in interactive emotion training either with or without musical engagement for three months. Both groups were then re-tested with two violation-of-expectation paradigms respectively assessing their sensitivity to some expressive features in music and understanding of the link between emotion and behaviour in simple action sequences. The infants who had participated in music, but not those who had not, were surprised by music-face inconsistent displays and were able to interpret an agent's action as guided by her expressed emotion. The findings suggest a privileged role of musical experience in prompting infants to form emotional representations, which support their understanding of the association between affective states and action.

The developmental trajectory of pointing perception in the first year of life

The present study investigated the development of the neural basis of pointing perception in 6-month- and 13-month-old infants. In a spatial-cueing paradigm, infants were presented with a peripheral target followed by a hand pointing toward (congruent condition) or away (incongruent condition) from the previously cued location. EEG responses to the presentation of the hand were measured. Thirteen-month-olds demonstrated larger amplitudes of ERP component P400 to incongruent compared to congruent pointing gestures over posterior temporal areas; 6-month-olds did not show any differential activation. This result suggests that the neural correlates of pointing perception undergo substantial development between 6 and 13 months of age.

Connecting the dots from infancy to childhood: a longitudinal study connecting gaze following, language, and explicit theory of mind

This longitudinal study tested the same children at three time points: infancy (10.5 months of age), toddlerhood (2.5 years of age), and early childhood (4.5 years of age). At 10.5 months, infants were assessed experimentally with a gaze-following paradigm. At 2.5 years, children's language skills were measured using the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories. At 4.5 years, children's explicit theory of mind was assessed with a standard test battery. Analyses revealed that infants with higher gaze-following scores at 10.5 months produced significantly more mental-state words at 2.5 years and that children with more mental-state words at 2.5 years were more successful on the theory-of-mind battery at 4.5 years. These predictive longitudinal relationships remained significant after controlling for general language, maternal education, and nonsocial attention. The results illuminate the bridging role that language plays in connecting infants' social cognition to children's later understanding of others' mental states. The obtained specificity in the longitudinal relations informs theories concerning mechanisms of developmental change.

Infant, Control Thyself: Infants' Integration of Multiple Social Cues to Regulate Their Imitative Behavior

This study investigated 15-month-old infants' (N = 150) ability to self-regulate based on observing a social interaction between two adults. Infants were bystanders to a social exchange in which an Experimenter performed actions on objects and an Emoter expressed anger, as if they were forbidden acts. Next, the Emoter became neutral and her visual access to the infant was experimentally manipulated. The Emoter either: (a) left the room, (b) turned her back, (c) faced the infant but looked down at a magazine, or (d) faced and looked toward the infant. Infants were then presented with the test objects. When the previously angry Emoter was facing them, infants were hesitant to imitate the demonstrated acts in comparison to the other conditions. We hypothesize that infants integrated the emotional and visual-perceptual cues to determine whether the Emoter would get angry at them, and then regulated their behavior accordingly. Temperament was related to infants' self-regulation -infants with higher impulsivity scores were more likely to perform the forbidden acts. Taken together, these findings provide insight into the roots of executive functions in late infancy.

Does own experience affect perception of others' actions in capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella)?

Anticipating another's actions is an important ability in social animals. Recent research suggests that in human adults and infants one's own action experience facilitates understanding and anticipation of others' actions. We investigated the link between first-person experience and perception of another's action in adult tufted capuchin monkeys (Sapajus apella spp., formerly Cebus apella spp.). In Experiment 1, the monkeys observed a familiar human (actor) trying to open a container using either a familiar or an unfamiliar action. They looked for longer when the actor tried to open the container using a familiar action. In Experiment 2, the actor performed two novel actions on a new container. The monkeys looked equally at the two actions. In Experiment 3, the monkeys were trained to open the container using one of the novel actions in Experiment 2. After training, we repeated the same procedure as in Experiment 2. The monkeys looked for longer when the actor manipulated the container using the action they had practiced than when she used the unfamiliar action. These results show that knowledge derived from one's own experience impacts perception of another's action in these New World monkeys.

Mirroring and the development of action understanding

The discovery of mirror neurons in the monkey motor cortex has inspired wide-ranging hypotheses about the potential relationship between action control and social cognition. In this paper, we consider the hypothesis that this relationship supports the early development of a critical aspect of social understanding, the ability to analyse others' actions in terms of goals. Recent investigations of infant action understanding have revealed rich connections between motor development and the analysis of goals in others' actions. In particular, infants' own goal-directed actions influence their analysis of others' goals. This evidence indicates that the cognitive systems that drive infants' own actions contribute to their analysis of goals in others' actions. These effects occur at a relatively abstract level of analysis both in terms of the structure infants perceive in others' actions and relevant structure in infants' own actions. Although the neural bases of these effects in infants are not yet well understood, current evidence indicates that connections between action production and action perception in infancy involve the interrelated neural systems at work in generating planned, intelligent action.

Neural mirroring mechanisms and imitation in human infants

Studying human infants will increase our understanding of the nature, origins and function of neural mirroring mechanisms. Human infants are prolific imitators. Infant imitation indicates observation-execution linkages in the brain prior to language and protracted learning. Investigations of neural aspects of these linkages in human infants have focused on the sensorimotor mu rhythm in the electroencephalogram, which occurs in the alpha frequency range over central electrode sites. Recent results show that the infant mu rhythm is desynchronized during action execution as well as action observation. Current work is elucidating properties of the infant mu rhythm and how it may relate to prelinguistic action processing and social understanding. Here, we consider this neuroscience research in relation to developmental psychological theory, particularly the 'Like-Me' framework, which holds that one of the chief cognitive tasks of the human infant is to map the similarity between self and other. We elucidate the value of integrating neuroscience findings with behavioural studies of infant imitation, and the reciprocal benefit of examining mirroring mechanisms from an ontogenetic perspective.