Department of Cognitive Science, Cognitive Development Center, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary.
Department of Cognitive Science, Cognitive Development Center, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary.
Cognition. 2021 Aug;213:104640. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104640. Epub 2021 Mar 20.
Recent evidence suggests that young infants, as well as nonhuman apes, can anticipate others' behavior based on their false beliefs. While such behaviors have been proposed to be accounted by simple associations between agents, objects, and locations, human adults are undoubtedly endowed with sophisticated theory of mind abilities. For example, they can attribute mental contents about abstract or non-existing entities, or beliefs whose content is poorly specified. While such endeavors may be human specific, it is unclear whether the representational apparatus that allows for encoding such beliefs is present early in development. In four experiments we asked whether 15-month-old infants are able to attribute beliefs with underspecified content, update their content later, and maintain attributed beliefs that are unknown to be true or false. In Experiment 1, infants observed as an agent hid an object to an unspecified location. This location was later revealed in the absence or presence of the agent, and the object was then hidden again to an unspecified location. Then the infants could search for the object while the agent was away. Their search was biased to the revealed location (that could be represented as the potential content of the agent's belief when she had not witnessed the re-hiding), suggesting that they (1) first attributed an underspecified belief to the agent, (2) later updated the content of this belief, and (3) were primed by this content in their own action even though its validity was unknown. This priming effect was absent when the agent witnessed the re-hiding of the object, and thus her belief about the earlier location of the object did not have to be sustained. The same effect was observed when infants searched for a different toy (Experiment 2) or when an additional spatial transformation was introduced (Experiment 4), but not when the spatial transformation disrupted belief updating (Experiment 3). These data suggest that infants' representational apparatus is prepared to efficiently track other agents' beliefs online, encode underspecified beliefs and define their content later, possibly reflecting a crucial characteristic of mature theory of mind: using a metarepresentational format for ascribed beliefs.
最近的证据表明，婴儿和非人类的猿类可以根据他人的错误信念来预测他人的行为。虽然这些行为可以通过主体、物体和地点之间的简单联想来解释，但人类成年人无疑具有复杂的心理理论能力。例如，他们可以归因于抽象或不存在的实体的心理内容，或者是内容描述不充分的信念。虽然这些努力可能是人类特有的，但尚不清楚允许编码这些信念的表示装置是否在早期发展中存在。在四项实验中，我们询问 15 个月大的婴儿是否能够归因于内容描述不充分的信念、稍后更新其内容，并保持未知为真或假的归因信念。在实验 1 中，婴儿观察到一个主体将一个物体藏到一个未指定的位置。然后在主体在场或不在场的情况下揭示了这个位置，然后再次将物体藏到一个未指定的位置。之后，当主体离开时，婴儿可以搜索物体。他们的搜索偏向于揭示的位置（当主体没有目睹重新隐藏时，该位置可以被表示为主体信念的潜在内容），这表明他们（1）首先归因于主体一个内容描述不充分的信念，（2）稍后更新该信念的内容，（3）即使其有效性未知，也会被该内容在自己的行为中激发。当主体目睹物体的重新隐藏时，这种激发效应不存在，因此她关于物体先前位置的信念不必保持不变。当婴儿搜索不同的玩具（实验 2）或引入额外的空间转换时（实验 4），观察到了相同的效果，但当空间转换干扰了信念更新时（实验 3），则没有观察到相同的效果。这些数据表明，婴儿的表示装置准备好在线高效地跟踪其他主体的信念，对内容描述不充分的信念进行编码，并稍后定义其内容，这可能反映了成熟心理理论的一个关键特征：为归因信念使用元表示格式。
