Steering towards a Developmental Account of Infant Social Understanding

Bibliographic Data

ID20256136
AuthorsJames Stack (Lancaster University), Charlie Lewis (0000-0001-9883-7893, Lancaster University)
Year2008
Volume51
Issue4
Pages229-234
Publication date2008-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueHuman Development (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0018-716X • E-ISSN: 1423-0054
PublisherS. Karger AG (PUBLISHER • CH)
DOI10.1159/000151493
OpenAlexW1965076547
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited16

The past few years have witnessed a renaissance in studies of very early social understanding. Having been largely eclipsed by the assumption made in the ‘theory of mind’ literature that social development is driven in the fourth year of life, this regeneration resulted from some fascinating empirical findings. Yet we contend that clear theoretical advances are needed to explain these fascinating data. While much of this debate has been stimulated by research on infant perceptual preferences, social interactional skills, joint attention, and early language use, perhaps it is the findings of both Onishi and Baillargeon [2005] and Surian, Caldi and Sperber [2007] that are the most dramatic, appealing, and yet contentious in equal measure. They provide evidence to suggest that toddlers look longer at an event when an agent appears to act contrary to what would be expected from her previous actions – e.g., reaching to a yellow box after she has placed an object in the green one and the object has moved in her absence. Such findings have led to two explanations based upon well-worn and, we contend, ultimately doomed lines of argument – the Scylla of nativism and the Charybdis of associationism. The parallels between this nonverbal violation-of-expectation task and the unexpected transfer false belief test [Wimmer & Perner, 1983] have led Onishi and Baillargeon [2005] to suggest that ‘15-month-old infants already possess (at least in a rudimentary and implicit form) a representational theory of mind’ (p. 257), and Surian, Caldi and Sperber [2007] to contend ‘that infants possess an incipient metarepresentational ability that permits them to attribute beliefs to agents’ (p. 580). If correct, these ‘rich’ nativist interpretations suggest a need for a dramatic reappraisal of our understanding of the developmental progression toward belief state reasoning in early childhood. Leslie [2005] has built on these findings to argue that a specialised neurocognitive system (ToMM or theory of mind module) [Leslie, 1987] may now account for pretend, desire, and belief representations within the first two years of life: ‘Suddenly, the idea of early ToMM is not so crazy after all’ (p. 460). Yet there are several reasons why we should be cautious about this nativist claim. It hinges on how data from paradigms like ‘infant false belief ’ are interpreted. The debates go back a long while. For example, ‘rich’ interpretations of Woodward’s [1998] fascinating reaching studies assumed that infants show an awareness of

Argument (complex analysis) · Cognition · Cognitive psychology · Cognitive science · Developmental psychology · Epistemology · Imitation · Joint attention · Linguistics · Object (grammar) · Parallels · Perception · Theory of mind · Child and Animal Learning Development · Language and cultural evolution · Language Development and Disorders · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology

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