Babies May Understand Others’ Feelings Earlier Than Believed

Thursday, January 31st, 2013

Babies as young as a year-and-a-half can guess what adults are thinking and demonstrate remarkable empathy and “mind reading,” according to a new global study published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society this week.  This ability to understand other people’s perspectives, wishes, and feelings had previously been believed not to appear until children are much older.  More from LiveScience:

The findings may shed light on the social abilities that differentiate us from our closest living relatives, chimpanzees, said study author H. Clark Barrett, an anthropologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. The study used a form of the false-belief test, one of the few cognitive tasks that young children, but not primates, can do.

Humans are “very good at inferring other people’s mental states: their emotions, their desires and, in this case, their knowledge,” Barrett said. “So it could play an important role in cultural transmission and social learning.”

In the classic test of children’s understanding called the false-belief task, one person comes into a room and puts an object (such as a pair of scissors) into a hiding place. A second person then comes in and puts the scissors into his pocket, unbeknownst to the first individual. When that first person returns, someone will ask the child, “Where do you think the first person will look for the scissors?”

The task is tricky because the children need to have a theory of mind, or an ability to understand other people’s perspectives, in this case that of the individual who didn’t see the scissors being retrieved by another.

By ages 4 to 7, most children in Western countries can answer that the first person will look in the original hiding place, because the individual doesn’t know the scissors have moved. But children across the globe tend to give that answer at different ages.

However, past work showed that if researchers don’t ask babies the question, but instead follow the infants’ eye movements, the children seem to understand the concept much earlier. Barrett and his colleagues wondered whether cultural differences in dealing with adults could be obscuring the amazing cognitive leap children were taking.

Image: Baby and adult, via Shutterstock

Harvard Lab Uses Infants’ Gazes to Track Cognitive Development

Tuesday, May 1st, 2012

An article in The New York Times profiles an innovative research technique in practice in Harvard University’s psychology department, which is giving scientists new ways of understanding how–and when–infants learn and develop social and cognitive skills.

Elizabeth S. Spelke is a professor of psychology founded the Harvard University Laboratory for Developmental Studies to measure what infants’ gazes tell us about how their brains are working and growing. What Spelke and her colleagues learn has implications for both child development and adult psychology.

From the Times:

Dr. Spelke studies babies not because they’re cute but because they’re root. “I’ve always been fascinated by questions about human cognition and the organization of the human mind,” she said, “and why we’re good at some tasks and bad at others.”

But the adult mind is far too complicated, Dr. Spelke said, “too stuffed full of facts” to make sense of it. In her view, the best way to determine what, if anything, humans are born knowing, is to go straight to the source, and consult the recently born.

Dr. Spelke is a pioneer in the use of the infant gaze as a key to the infant mind — that is, identifying the inherent expectations of babies as young as a week or two by measuring how long they stare at a scene in which those presumptions are upended or unmet. “More than any scientist I know, Liz combines theoretical acumen with experimental genius,” Dr. [Susan] Carey, [a co-founder of the lab] said. Nancy Kanwisher, a neuroscientist at M.I.T., put it this way: “Liz developed the infant gaze idea into a powerful experimental paradigm that radically changed our view of infant cognition.”

The article goes on to describe some of the things Spelke has discovered about infant brains, including that they babies expect physical objects to remain consistent, can understand the basics of “more” and “less,” and have no ability to orient themselves based on landmarks or physical cues.

Image: Baby with flash card, via Shutterstock.