Burnside Kimberly, Neumann Cassandra, Poulin-Dubois Diane
Department of Psychology, Concordia University, Montréal, QC, Canada.
Front Psychol. 2020 Sep 22;11:547680. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.547680. eCollection 2020.
It has been argued that infants possess a rich, sophisticated theory of mind (ToM) that is only revealed with tasks based on spontaneous responses. A mature (ToM) implies the understanding that mental states are person specific. Previous studies on infants' understanding of motivational mental states, such as goals and preferences have revealed that, by 9 months of age, infants do not generalize these motivational mental states across agents. However, it remains to be determined if infants also perceive epistemic states as person specific. Therefore, the goal of the present study was to use a switch agent paradigm with the classic false belief violation-of-expectation task. Results revealed that 16-month-old infants attributed true and false beliefs to a naïve agent - they did not perceive beliefs as person specific. These findings indicate that the mechanisms that underlie infants' implicit attribution of beliefs differ from those assumed for explicit reasoning about beliefs.
有人认为，婴儿拥有丰富、复杂的心理理论（ToM），这种理论只有通过基于自发反应的任务才能揭示出来。成熟的心理理论意味着理解心理状态是因人而异的。先前关于婴儿对动机性心理状态（如目标和偏好）理解的研究表明，到9个月大时，婴儿不会将这些动机性心理状态推广到不同的主体身上。然而，婴儿是否也将认知状态视为因人而异的，这还有待确定。因此，本研究的目的是在经典的错误信念违背预期任务中使用切换主体范式。结果显示，16个月大的婴儿会将真信念和假信念归因于一个天真的主体——他们并不认为信念是因人而异的。这些发现表明，婴儿对信念的隐性归因所基于机制与对信念进行明确推理所假定的机制不同。
