Longer Looking to Agent with False Belief at 7 but Not 6 months of Age

Overview

Journal Infant Child Dev

Date 2022 Jul 22

PMID 35864890

Authors

Amy Hirshkowitz

M D Rutherford

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Theory of mind refers to the ability to reason about others' beliefs and to understand others' behaviour in terms of those beliefs. A large body of previous research has examined theory of mind reasoning in young children using false belief tasks, but tasks to examine this capacity during infancy have only been developed more recently. This research used stimuli developed by Kovács, et al., , 2010, 330, 1830-1834, to measure looking time to an agent with a false belief in infants aged 6 and 7 months. Using an eye-tracking procedure, we found looking behaviour consistent with 7-month-olds distinguishing an agent who has a false belief from one who has a true belief, consistent with the results reported by Kovács et al. We did not find evidence of this looking preference among 6-month-olds.

Citing Articles

Characterization of implicit and explicit mind-reading in children with autism based on eye movements.

Lu H, Niu J, Wang J, Liu M, Xu M Front Psychiatry. 2024; 15:1449995.

PMID: 39540011 PMC: 11557946. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyt.2024.1449995.

Longer looking to agent with false belief at 7 but not 6 months of age.

Hirshkowitz A, Rutherford M Infant Child Dev. 2022; 30(5):e2263.

PMID: 35864890 PMC: 9286622. DOI: 10.1002/icd.2263.

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