The mentalistic basis of core social cognition: experiments in preverbal infants and a computational model.

By J. Kiley Hamlin, Tomer D. Ullman, Josh Tenenbaum, Noah D. Goodman, Chris L. Baker. 2013

221 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Evaluating individuals based on their pro- and anti-social behaviors is fundamental to successful human interaction. Recent research suggests that even preverbal infants engage in social evaluation; however, it remains an open question whether infants’ judgments are driven uniquely by an analysis of the mental states that motivate others’ helpful and unhelpful actions, or whether non-mentalistic inferences are at play. Here we present evidence from 10-month-olds, motivated and supported by a Bayesian computational model, for mentalistic social evaluation in the first year of life.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Pharmacy, Social Psychology

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In Developmental and Educational Psychology

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Citations in the corpus

On the nature and origin of intuitive theories : learning, physics and psychology (2015, background): “New joint work [93] shows that infants distinguish perceptually identical actions depending on the social goals, preferences, and perceptual access of other agents, as predicted by an extension of the model presented here.”
Human Learning in Atari (2017, background): “…Slaughter, and Carey 1998; Tremoulet and Feldman 2000; Csibra et al. 2003; Schlottmann et al. 2006; Spelke and Kinzler 2007; Csibra 2008; Kiley Hamlin et al. 2013), and that humans have the capacity to rapidly acquire new concepts (Carey 1978; Landau, Smith, and Jones 1988; Markman 1989;…”
Rational quantitative attribution of beliefs, desires and percepts in human mentalizing (2017, background): “BToM models can be extended to include richer environment and action models sensitive to intuitive physics 12 , and multi-agent planning to parse competitive or cooperative social interactions such as chasing and fleeing 46 or helping and hindering 47 .”
Replications of implicit theory of mind tasks with varying representational demands (2017, background): “Goal attribution relies on information about what others perceive and know about the world (Baker, Saxe & Tenenbaum, 2009; Hamlin et al., 2013; Luo & Baillargeon, 2007), so if infants can represent others’ awareness or beliefs, then they may infer different goals, on the basis of the same actions,…”
The Naïve Utility Calculus: Computational Principles Underlying Commonsense Psychology. (2016, background): “Moreover, infants’ evaluations are transitive (they prefer agents who hinder hinderers and help helpers; [97-98]) and they only positively evaluate agents if they helped intentionally [21] and did so with knowledge of the recipients’ preferences [22].”