Department of Psychology, University of Gothenburg, Sweden.
Dev Sci. 2012 Sep;15(5):633-40. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2012.01155.x. Epub 2012 May 17.
Based on anticipatory looking and reactions to violations of expected events, infants have been credited with 'theory of mind' (ToM) knowledge that a person's search behaviour for an object will be guided by true or false beliefs about the object's location. However, little is known about the preconditions for looking patterns consistent with belief attribution in infants. In this study, we compared the performance of 17- to 26-month-olds on anticipatory looking in ToM tasks. The infants were either hearing or were deaf from hearing families and thus delayed in communicative experience gained from access to language and conversational input. Hearing infants significantly outperformed their deaf counterparts in anticipating the search actions of a cartoon character that held a false belief about a target-object location. By contrast, the performance of the two groups in a true belief condition did not differ significantly. These findings suggest for the first time that access to language and conversational input contributes to early ToM reasoning.
基于对预期事件的预期性注视和反应，婴儿被认为具有“心理理论”（ToM）知识，即一个人的搜索行为将受到关于物体位置的真实或虚假信念的指导。然而，对于与信念归因一致的注视模式的婴儿的前提条件知之甚少。在这项研究中，我们比较了 17 至 26 个月大的婴儿在 ToM 任务中的预期性注视表现。这些婴儿要么来自听力家庭，要么来自听力受损家庭，因此在获得语言和对话输入方面的交流经验方面存在延迟。听力婴儿在预测持有目标物体位置错误信念的卡通角色的搜索行为方面明显优于听力受损的婴儿。相比之下，两组在真实信念条件下的表现没有显著差异。这些发现首次表明，语言和对话输入的获取有助于早期 ToM 推理。
