Infants Track False Beliefs

Lecturer: Stephen A. Butterfill

Many behaviours exhibited by infants, including anticipatory looking, looking time, pointing and helping activities, show sensitivity to what others believe even when their beliefs are false.

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Notes

For a process to track someone’s belief that p is for it to nonaccidentally depend in some way on whether she believes that p. For someone to track beliefs is for there to be processes in her which track some beliefs.

One-year-old children predict actions of agents with false beliefs about the locations of objects (Clements & Perner, 1994; Onishi & Baillargeon, 2005; Southgate, Senju, & Csibra, 2007),¹ and about the contents of containers (He, Bolz, & Baillargeon, 2011), taking into account verbal communication (Song, Onishi, Baillargeon, & Fisher, 2008; Scott et al., 2012). They will also choose ways of helping (Buttelmann, Carpenter, & Tomasello, 2009) and communicating (Knudsen & Liszkowski, 2012; Southgate, Chevallier, & Csibra, 2010) with others depending on whether their beliefs are true or false. And in much the way that irrelevant facts about the contents of others’ beliefs modulate adult subjects’ response times, such facts also affect how long 7-month-old infants look at some stimuli (Kovács, Téglás, & Endress, 2010).

Beyond Replication Issues

A surprising number of findings have turned out to be inexplicably hard to replicate, while other findings have been replicated.² Even more confusingly, some findings have been both successfully and unsuccessfully replicated (for example, see Kulke & Rakoczy, 2018 on Southgate et al., 2007).

Beyond questions of replication, there are two challenges. First, when various tasks are supposed to measure a single ability, we would normally expect to find signs of convergence in performance across the tasks: that is, those and only those subjects who pass one of these tasks will tend to pass other tasks. Kulke et al. (2017, p. 2) observe that whereas performance on false belief tasks used to test older children is convergent in this sense, there is little evidence of convergence for false belief tasks suitable for infants; and Poulin-Dubois & Yott (2017) find evidence for divergence. Second Wellman (2018, p. 741) notes that in tasks typically used with older children, measures of belief tracking are predictive of social skills, whereas there is as yet little evidence that performance on belief tracking tasks used with infants predicts social abilities.

My Guess

My guess is that even two- and three-year-olds really can track beliefs. I thought there was already a case for this guess twenty years before this course (Butterfill, 2001). And even taking seriously the challenges and the patterns of success and failure in replication studies, on balance the evidence in favour of this guess has grown since then.

Against this Poulin-Dubois et al. (2018) argue that issues with replication prevent us from knowing, at present, whether infants track false beliefs.

References

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