Probing the depth of infants’ theory of mind: Disunity in performance across paradigms

By D. Poulin-Dubois, J. Yott. 2017

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There is currently a hot debate in the literature regarding whether or not infants have a true ToM understanding. According to the mentalistic view, infants possess the same false belief understanding that older children have but their competence is masked by task demands. On the other hand, others have proposed that preverbal infants are incapable of mental state attribution and simply respond to superficial features of the events in spontaneous-responses tasks. In the current study, we aimed to clarify the nature of infants’ performance in tasks designed to assess implicit theory of mind (ToM) by adopting a within-subject design that involved testing 18-month-old infants on two batteries of tasks measuring the same four ToM constructs (intention, desire, true belief, and false belief). One battery included tasks based on the violation-of-expectation (VOE) procedure, whereas the other set of tasks was based on the interactive, helping procedure. Replication of the original findings varied across tasks, due to methodological changes and the use of a within-subject design. Convergent validity was examined by comparing performance on VOE and interactive tasks that are considered to be measures of the same theory of mind concept. The results revealed no significant relations between performance on the pairs of tasks for any of the four ToM constructs measured. This pattern of results is discussed in terms of current conflicting accounts of infants’ performance on implicit ToM tasks.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Pharmacy, Social Psychology, Cognitive Science & Psychology

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Citations in the corpus

Neural Theory-of-Mind? On the Limits of Social Intelligence in Large LMs (2022, background): “On the other hand, some argue that language develops after TOM since preverbal infants already could possess some level of TOM-like abilities (Onishi and Baillargeon, 2005; Southgate and Vernetti, 2014; Poulin-Dubois and Yott, 2018).”
Do infants understand false beliefs? We don’t know yet – A commentary on Baillargeon, Buttelmann and Southgate’s commentary (2018, background): “The few studies published that tested FB understanding across paradigms (e.g., VoE vs Interactive) with a within-subject design have yielded null results (Dörrenberg et al., 2018; Kulke, von Duhn, Schneider, & Rakoczy, 2018; Poulin-Dubois & Yott, 2017; Powell et al., 2018).”
Replications of implicit theory of mind tasks with varying representational demands (2017, background): “…awareness, or ignorance, regarding the status of an object, but do not routinely make specific predictions on the basis of false beliefs (e.g. Poulin-Dubois & Yott, 2017; Surian et al., 2007; Yott & Poulin-Dubois, 2016) and may even fail to use true beliefs to predict behavior when the…”