Infants Have Theory of Mind By 13 Months

New research shows that babies can read minds...sort of.

Theory of Mind, the ability to recognize that others have their own thoughts and emotions, has long been a hot topic in the field of infant cognition. Famous developmental psychologist Jean Piaget argued that children remain naive to distinctions between self and other until around age seven. More recent theorists have cut that number down to three or four years. However, in a recent study, Italian researcher Luca Surian has shown that infants as young as 13 months old have the ability to represent the thoughts of others in their own minds.

In Surian's experiment, 56 infants between the ages of 12 and 14.5 months were videotaped while watching a computer animation of a caterpillar. The animation showed two screens tall enough as to be opaque to the caterpillar, but angled so that the spectator could see what was behind them. A human hand repeatedly placed a piece of cheese behind one screen and an apple behind the other without changing the location of the objects. The caterpillar then entered and repeatedly went behind the same screen to eat the cheese.

This familiarization trial was repeated four times. In the fifth familiarization trial, the human hand switched the placement of the cheese and apple but the caterpillar did not come out. A test trial then followed in which half of the infants in the "seeing condition" now viewed the scene with lower screens which left the food objects visible to both spectator and caterpillar. Meanwhile the barriers remained too tall for the caterpillar to see over in animations viewed by infants in the "not seeing condition."

This time, a human hand switched the location of the apple and the cheese. The caterpillar then either took his old route to the newly placed apple or took a new route to the cheese's new location.

Analyzing videotapes of the infants during the trials, researchers timed how long the infants stared at the screen. They found that infants in the "seeing condition" stared longer when the caterpillar could see both foods but now chose the apple rather than the cheese it had previously favored. Meanwhile infants in the "not seeing condition" looked longer when the caterpillar found its way back to the cheese even though it presumably couldn't see it.

According to the report, this shows that infants have an awareness of a view other than their own.

The results indicate that infants in both conditions took into account the agents' visual perspective. Given that, on the test trials, the objects were visible to the infants in both conditions but were visible also to the agent in the seeing condition only, these results indicate that infants are capable of distinguishing between their own visual perspective and that of other individuals.

FULL TEXT: Attribution of beliefs by 13-month-old infants (PDF)