REPORT
Seeing the World From Others’ Perspective:
14-Month-Olds Show Altercentric Modulation
Effects by Others’ Beliefs
Dora Kampis1,2
and Ágnes Melinda Kovács1
1Département de psychologie, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
2Department of Cognitive Science, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary/ Vienna, Austria
un accès ouvert
journal
Mots clés: altercentrism, infants, manual search, object representation, theory of mind, aspectuality
ABSTRAIT
Humans have a propensity to readily adopt others’ perspective, which often influences their
behavior even when it seemingly should not. This altercentric influence has been widely
studied in adults, yet we lack an understanding of its ontogenetic origins. The current studies
investigated whether 14-month-olds’ search in a box for potential objects is modulated by
another person’s belief about the box’s content. We varied the person’s potential belief such
that in her presence/absence an object was removed, added, or exchanged for another,
leading to her true/false belief about the object’s presence (Experiment 1, n = 96); ou
transformed into another object, leading to her true/false belief about the object’s identity (c'est à dire.,
the objects represented under a specific aspect, Experiment 2, n = 32). Infants searched longer
if the other person believed that an object remained in the box, showing an altercentric
influence early in development. These results suggest that infants spontaneously represent
others’ beliefs involving multiple objects and raise the possibility that infants can appreciate
that others encode the world under a unique aspect.
Citation: Kampis, D., & Kovács, Á. M..
(2021). Seeing the World From Others’
Perspective: 14-Month-Olds Show
Altercentric Modulation Effects by
Others’ Beliefs. Open Mind:
Discoveries in Cognitive Science, 5,
189–207. https://doi.org/10.1162/opmi
_a_00050
EST CE QUE JE:
https://doi.org/10.1162/opmi_a_00050
INTRODUCTION
Supplemental Materials:
https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/ZVEBZH
Reçu: 14 Novembre 2020
Accepté: 17 Novembre 2021
Intérêts concurrents: The authors
declare no conflict of interest.
Auteur correspondant:
Dora Kampis
dk@psy.ku.dk
droits d'auteur: © 2021
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Publié sous Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International
(CC PAR 4.0) Licence
La presse du MIT
The highly social nature of human existence requires us to be equipped with cognitive mech-
anisms that allow proficient navigation in the social world. As individuals tend to differ in their
connaissance, intentions, and abilities, we often have to rapidly infer others’ unique perspective.
Various abilities may support human sociality, some of which, Par exemple, sensitivity to
others’ beliefs, may be present early in ontogeny (Baillargeon et al., 2010). Uncovering the
nature and development of these cognitive mechanisms is still one of the liveliest domains
in research on social cognition (Baillargeon et al., 2018un; Carruthers, 2013; Perner & Ruffman,
2005; Poulin-Dubois et al., 2018; Rakoczy, 2012). It is uncontroversial that humans eventually
arrive to the ability to consider others’ mental states when they are prompted to, for example in
communicative or collaborative contexts (Hanna et al., 2003; Schober, 1993). Cependant, con-
sidering what others see or know can also be cognitively challenging, making us egocentric:
attending to our own perspective and only with effort attend to, or judge, that of others (Keysar
et coll., 2003; Nickerson, 1999). In line with humans’ pronounced sociality compared to other
animals (Herrmann et al., 2007), cependant, recently it has been argued that humans may in fact
have a strong tendency to attend to others (Kovács et al., 2010). People often seem to readily
je
D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d
F
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
je
r
e
c
t
.
m
je
t
.
/
e
d
toi
o
p
m
je
/
je
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d
F
/
d
o
je
/
je
/
/
.
1
0
1
1
6
2
o
p
m
_
un
_
0
0
0
5
0
2
0
3
6
0
6
7
o
p
m
_
un
_
0
0
0
5
0
p
d
.
/
je
F
b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
Altercentric Modulation in 14-Month-Old Infants
Kampis and Kovács
compute others’ perspective and mental states—that is, what and how they perceive in their
environment and the consequent mental representations they may form—even when this is
not required by the situation or task they are performing, or it is even disadvantageous.
Humans are thus inclined to spontaneously focus on the perspective of others: they tend to
be altercentric (Samson et al., 2010), and a growing body evidence suggests that this tendency
is more widespread than previously considered (Kampis & Southgate, 2020).
Altercentrism in human cognition reflects that people’s behavior is spontaneously influ-
enced by the presence, and perspective, of others, even when their task requires them to focus
on their own point of view (Elekes et al., 2017; Kovács et al., 2010; Samson et al., 2010). Pour
example, adults typically detect a ball slower that appears from behind an occluder when they
do not expect it to be present. Cependant, they detect the ball slightly faster when another agent
in the scene (who is not relevant for participants’ task) believes it to be present, indicating an
influence of the agent’s belief on people’s responses (Kovács et al., 2010). While a subsequent
study proposed that this effect may have been due to a manipulation in the paradigm related
to the timing of participants’ button presses during attention checks (Phillips et al., 2015),
others have adapted the paradigm with matched timings between the different trials, repli-
cated the effect, and consequently ruled out the attention check-based alternative explanation
(el Kaddouri et al., 2019). The sensitivity to the other’s perspective also appears in joint tasks
where participants act together (Elekes, Bródy, et coll., 2016; Freundlieb et al., 2016). While one
likely role of altercentrism is facilitating interactions, others’ perspective can influence peo-
ple’s behavior even when there is no obvious or immediate interactive context. Even if the
other is not engaged in any task, adults’ reaction times are affected by the belief of another
agent (Kovács et al., 2010; Van Der Wel et al., 2014), or by a mismatch between their own and
someone else’s perspective (Samson et al., 2010). From a broader perspective, altercentrism in
adults has been argued to enable rapid computations of others’ mental states (Kovács et al.,
2010), likely supporting human social behavior in general. If altercentric effects are indeed as
widespread in humans as indicated by recent accounts (Kampis & Southgate, 2020), this raises
the question whether and how they manifest in ontogeny.
Early in development, a large body of studies points toward infants’ sensitivity to others’
visual and mental perspective (Baillargeon et al., 2010; Carruthers, 2013; Kampis et al.,
2020). Besides direct and conceptual replications of various paradigms used with infants
(Buttelmann et al., 2015; Király et al., 2018; Schneider et al., 2012; Thoermer et al., 2012),
there has also been a recent increase in studies unable to replicate some of the original find-
ings (Baillargeon et al., 2018b; Barone et al., 2019; Kulke & Rakoczy, 2018; Poulin-Dubois
et coll., 2018), leading to a still ongoing debate regarding the replicability of these phenomena,
and giving rise to multi-lab collaborations aiming at large-scale studies probing infants’ perfor-
mance on different theory of mind tasks (Schuwerk, Kampis, et coll., 2021). En même temps, le
underlying abilities have been heavily debated, some accounts arguing that evidence on infants’
mental state understanding can be explained by cognitive mechanisms that do not fully resemble
those present in older children or adults (Apperly & Butterfill, 2009; Butterfill & Apperly, 2013), ou
do not pertain to mental state reasoning at all but are rather explained by perceptual biases (Heyes,
2014) or rule-based heuristics (Perner & Ruffman, 2005). Relatedly, it has been a long-held tradi-
tion that children start out egocentric, based on findings showing that children have difficulties
thinking about the perspective of others (Piaget, 1926), to the extent that similarly to adults they
experience interference from their own knowledge (Birch & Bloom, 2004). In contrast, South-
gate (2020) recently proposed that from a developmental perspective it could be particularly
advantageous to have a disposition to attend to others’ point of view from early on, arguing that
young infants may be altercentric and show pronounced attention to others’ perspective.
OPEN MIND: Discoveries in Cognitive Science
190
je
D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d
F
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
je
r
e
c
t
.
m
je
t
.
/
e
d
toi
o
p
m
je
/
je
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d
F
/
d
o
je
/
je
/
.
/
1
0
1
1
6
2
o
p
m
_
un
_
0
0
0
5
0
2
0
3
6
0
6
7
o
p
m
_
un
_
0
0
0
5
0
p
d
.
/
je
F
b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
Altercentric Modulation in 14-Month-Old Infants
Kampis and Kovács
Altercentrism may indeed have a broader epistemic function by allowing us to identify
what information others possess when we aim to seek or transmit information. Infants face
a crucial learning task when discovering the world, and the social environment can help with
identifying relevant sources of information and guide their leaning. Attention to others’ per-
spective may enable infants to learn about the material world via the perspective of others
around them. Par exemple, studies have suggested that infants may learn about the valence
of objects through the preferences of others (Egyed et al., 2013; Kampis et al., 2013), and map
a new word to an object that was in the speaker’s center of attention, and not what they them-
selves were attending to (Baldwin, 1991). Par conséquent, one might wonder whether infants,
similarly to adults, may also show altercentrism. There is neuroimaging evidence that is con-
sistent with this possibility. Some work indicates that infants’ own representations and those
used to encode others’ perspective are handled at least in part by the same system (Kampis
et coll., 2015; Southgate & Vernetti, 2014), potentially increasing commensurability between the
two and providing grounds for explanation on how the other’s perspective may influence
infants’ behavior. Surtout, while there are studies documenting altercentric effects in children
(Buttelmann & Buttelmann, 2017; Elekes et al., 2017; Milward et al., 2014), to our knowledge
there is only one study that speaks to altercentric modulation in infants, where infants’ looking
times were influenced by another agent’s belief (Kovács et al., 2010).
The current studies asked whether altercentric modulation can be found in 14-month-old
infants in an active behavioral task. We adapted a task in which infants search longer in a box
if they think an object is still inside, compared to when the box is empty (Feigenson & Carey,
2003). The target age group was chosen as it is from this age onward when the effects of con-
ceptual and social information on infants’ behavior have been reliably probed with this par-
adigm (Feigenson & Carey, 2003; Feigenson & Halberda, 2008; Stahl & Feigenson, 2014,
2018). Our main goal was to establish the existence of altercentric effect in preverbal infants
in a task involving an active behavioral response. We modified the manual search paradigm to
assess how long infants would search depending on another person’s belief (c'est à dire., the belief
infants may ascribe to this person). Spécifiquement, we asked whether infants search longer in a
box if the other person believes that it contains an object, compared to when she believes it is
vide, while infants’ own belief was kept constant. In Experiment 1, to track the other’s belief,
infants had to keep in mind how many objects she believed to be in the box. In Experiment 2,
tracking the other’s belief required identifying the unique perspective or aspect (Perner et al.,
2011) under which she represented these objects.
EXPERIMENT 1
Method
In the three conditions of Experiment 1 we assessed whether 14-month-old infants’ (n =
32/condition) track events involving multiple objects and ascribe to others beliefs based on
spatiotemporal or feature-based tracking; and whether representing others’ beliefs may mod-
ulate infants’ own search behavior. The conditions differed in the events that led to the Actor’s
belief: whether in her presence or absence an object was (je) removed from-, (ii) added to-, (iii)
or exchanged in the box, corresponding to the three conditions. All studies received full ethical
approval from the United Ethical Review Committee for Research in Psychology in Hungary
and were conducted according to the principles of the Declaration of Helsinki. Les participants
caregivers gave written informed consent prior to participation. Datasets of the studies are avail-
able at the OPMI Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/ZVEBZH. Video recordings cannot
OPEN MIND: Discoveries in Cognitive Science
191
je
D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d
F
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
je
r
e
c
t
.
m
je
t
.
/
e
d
toi
o
p
m
je
/
je
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d
F
/
d
o
je
/
je
/
/
.
1
0
1
1
6
2
o
p
m
_
un
_
0
0
0
5
0
2
0
3
6
0
6
7
o
p
m
_
un
_
0
0
0
5
0
p
d
/
.
je
F
b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
Altercentric Modulation in 14-Month-Old Infants
Kampis and Kovács
be made publicly available due to privacy restrictions; sample videos are provided in the Sup-
plemental Materials.
Participants
Ninety-six healthy full-term 14-month-old infants participated (age range from 14;0 [Months;
Days] à 15;1, âge moyen = 14;17) in the study, randomly assigned to one of the three condi-
tion (N = 32/condition). The number of infants per condition was based on the study of
Feigenson and Carey (2003) who included n = 32 infants, and a power analysis for the main
analyse (one-sample t test on the difference scores) with medium effect size of Cohen’s d =
0.5, a power of 0.8 and alpha of 0.05, yielding n = 34. We therefore included n = 32 par
condition, yielding a total of n = 96. Thirty-seven additional infants were tested but not
included in the analyses because of passivity (they did not search in any of the trials, 22),
or because the study was not completed because the baby fussed out (10), or due to paren-
tal interference or experimental error (in the procedure or failure of the recording system) (5).
These inclusion rates are similar to those in previous studies using the manual search par-
adigm (Feigenson & Carey, 2003).
Procedure
We adapted a manual search task that was previously developed to study how infants track
objects and perform simple arithmetic operations on them from their own, first-person per-
spective ( Van de Walle et al., 2000). In such a task (Feigenson & Carey, 2003), 14-month-olds
witnessed a certain amount (2, 3, ou 4) of objects placed inside an opaque box. Suivant, infants
were allowed to retrieve some of the objects, and then were allowed to search further. Mea-
suring the duration of infants’ manual search in the box showed in such studies that infants
searched more persistently in the box if one of the objects was still inside, compared to when
all objects were already retrieved.
In the present experiments, in each condition infants first received three familiarization tri-
als that introduced them to the objects and the setup. Dans ces, the experimenter (who later
served as Actor, referred to as A), first hid an object in the box and then searched for it and
retrieved it herself, then in two subsequent trials she hid another object and encouraged the
infant to search for it. The purpose of these trials was to show the infants that objects can be
retrieved from the box, as well as to introduce an interaction between the Actor and the child
via a hiding and retrieving game, where his or her perspective about the presence or absence
of the objects could become salient. The other experimenter (the Confederate: C) sat passively
during these trials (see the Supplemental Materials methods for further details on familiariza-
tion and test trial procedure).
Familiarization trials were followed by two test trials where the other person’s belief was
varied between trials. Within each condition infants received two test trials (in counterbal-
anced order, randomly assigned): one trial where the Actor (depending on condition, correctly
or falsely) believed an object to be in the box [Actor believes: object present (Aobj_pres) trials]
and one where she (correctly or falsely) believed it was absent [Actor believes: object absent
(Aobj_abs) trials], while the infant’s belief was constant across the two trials.
In all conditions of Experiment 1, in the beginning of the test trials it was A who took out the
objet(s) from a purse on her side and put them in the box. Alors, A’s belief was varied depend-
ing on when she left the room (voir la figure 1) and the events she has witnessed: she either left
right after the hiding, or she stayed on while C added/retrieved/exchanged an object
OPEN MIND: Discoveries in Cognitive Science
192
je
D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d
F
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
je
r
e
c
t
.
m
je
t
.
/
e
d
toi
o
p
m
je
/
je
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d
F
/
d
o
je
/
je
.
/
/
1
0
1
1
6
2
o
p
m
_
un
_
0
0
0
5
0
2
0
3
6
0
6
7
o
p
m
_
un
_
0
0
0
5
0
p
d
/
.
je
F
b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
Altercentric Modulation in 14-Month-Old Infants
Kampis and Kovács
je
D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d
F
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
je
r
e
c
t
.
m
je
t
.
/
e
d
toi
o
p
m
je
/
je
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d
F
/
d
o
je
/
je
/
.
/
1
0
1
1
6
2
o
p
m
_
un
_
0
0
0
5
0
2
0
3
6
0
6
7
o
p
m
_
un
_
0
0
0
5
0
p
d
.
/
je
F
b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
Schematic depiction of events in test trials of a) Experiment 1: Object Absent condition, and b) Experiment 2. In Experiment 1 le
Chiffre 1.
other two other conditions differed from the Object Absent condition in the following ways. In the Object Present condition, the Actor (UN)
added initially only one object, and in A’s presence/absence the Confederate (C) added one more object. In the Object Exchanged-Absent
condition A initially added one object, and in her presence/absence C exchanged this object to an object of a different kind. All three con-
ditions ended with A removing one object, followed by a 15-s period during which infants were allowed to search in the box. For further
details on the procedure see text and Supplemental Materials.
(depending on condition, see below) and left after that. In all test trials upon her return A
retrieved one object from the box, and then the 15-s measurement period followed. During
the measurement period infants had the opportunity to search in the box, after which the
experimenter retrieved any “remaining” objects from the box before the next trial. Surtout,
in order to avoid the confound of some infants finding the object faster by chance, in all cases
when an object had “remained” in the box, this object was in fact surreptitiously put into a
hidden compartment. Donc, infants did not find an object in any of the test trials in Exper-
iment 1 ou 2, thus search durations reflect their persistence to search for a (potential) remaining
objet.
In the Object Absent condition initially there were two objects in the box, then both were
sequentially removed, therefore at the end of the trial infants knew the box was empty. In one
of two test trials the Actor (UN) did not witness that the second object was removed by the Con-
federate (C), and therefore believed that it remained in the box (Actor believes object present,
OPEN MIND: Discoveries in Cognitive Science
193
Altercentric Modulation in 14-Month-Old Infants
Kampis and Kovács
Aobj_pres; false belief trial). In the other test trial both A and the infant knew that all objects had
been retrieved (Actor believes object absent, Aobj_abs; true belief trial); voir la figure 1.
In the Object Present condition there was initially only one object in the box, then a second
(identical) one was added by C. Enfin, one of the two objects were removed, thus in the end
one object remained in the box. Infants in this condition therefore expected an object to
remain in the box. In one of two trials A did not see that a second one was added and therefore
in the end believed the box was empty (Actor believes object absent, Aobj_abs; false belief trial).
In the other trial A knew the second object was added and thus also expected an object to
remain in the box (Actor believes object present, Aobj_pres; true belief trial).
In the Object Exchanged-Absent condition initially there was one object in the box, lequel
was then exchanged to another (differently looking) one by C. Enfin, this second object was
removed, therefore at the end of the trial infants knew the box was empty. In one of two trials A
did not witness that the first object was exchanged to the second, and therefore believed that
the first object remained in the box by the end of the trial (Actor believes object present,
Aobj_pres; false belief trial). In the other test trial both A and the infant knew that when the sec-
ond object was removed the box remained empty (Actor believes object absent, Aobj_abs; true
belief trial).
Materials
We used a white cardboard box (29*29*15 cm) with a 14*8 cm opening that was covered by
an elastic cloth that prevented infants from seeing inside the box but enabled reaching into it.
The box had a hidden compartment in its back where objects could be hidden, and that was
inaccessible to the infants. In familiarization we used colorful whistles with a ball inside that
made a rattling sound. In test there were whistles of different colors (red, vert, or blue) que
did not rattle, and an additional toy rattle in the Object exchange condition (see the Supple-
mental Materials, Figure S1a–c).
Coding
je
D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d
F
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
je
r
e
c
t
.
m
je
t
.
/
e
d
toi
o
p
m
je
/
je
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d
F
/
d
o
je
/
je
/
.
/
1
0
1
1
6
2
o
p
m
_
un
_
0
0
0
5
0
2
0
3
6
0
6
7
o
p
m
_
un
_
0
0
0
5
0
p
d
/
.
je
We coded the duration of infants’ searching during the 15-s period when the box was in
front of them. Infants were scored as searching whenever one or both hands were in the
box, with their knuckles passing the entrance cloth of the box. If infants reached into the
box opening, but clearly just manipulated/played with the cloth, we did not count it as
searching. Half of the participants (n = 16) of each condition (Object Absent, Object Present,
and Object Exchanged-Absent) were coded on both trials by a second coder who was
unaware of the purpose of the study and the trial type (Aobj_abs vs. Aobj_pres); interrater agree-
ment was r(96) = .972, p < .001.
f
b
y
g
u
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
We calculated an altercentric modulation score for each infant via subtracting their search
duration on Aobj_abs trial (A believed there was no object in the box) from their search duration
on the Aobj_pres trial (A believed there was still an object in the box). Thus, the altercentric
modulation score reflected the difference in search times within participants, between the
two trials of a condition. Such a difference score is commonly used in this type of task, as
absolute search times may vary across infants (Feigenson & Carey, 2003; Stahl & Feigenson,
2018). A modulation score above 0 would reflect that infants search longer when the other
believes the object to be present, compared to when he or she believes the box is empty, given
that the infants’ own beliefs were kept constant.
OPEN MIND: Discoveries in Cognitive Science
194
Altercentric Modulation in 14-Month-Old Infants
Kampis and Kovács
Results
We first compared the altercentric modulation scores in Experiment 1 to chance level (0) (for
mean search values on individual trials, see the Supplemental Materials, Figure 4). Infants on
average searched longer on Aobj_pres trials than on Aobj_abs trials, as reflected by a positive alter-
centric modulation score (Mdiff = 0.924 s, SD = 3.529; see Figure 2a) significantly above
chance, t(95) = 2.565, p = .012; Cohen’s d = 0.262, 95% CI = [0.208, 1.639] (all statistical
tests two-tailed). Thus, infants overall searched significantly longer when the Actor believed an
object remained in the box, compared to when she believed there was no object left.
Subsequently the altercentric modulation scores were entered into a univariate ANOVA
with condition (Object Absent / Object Present / Object Exchanged-Absent) and Order of Test
(Aobj_pres first or Aobj_abs first) as between-subject factors, yielding a significant effect of Order
of Test, F(1, 90) = 15.59, p < .001, ηp
2 = .148, no effect of condition, F(2, 90) = 0.099, p =
.906, ηp
2 = .002, and no interaction between condition and order, F(2, 90) = 0.032, p = .969,
ηp
2 = .001. The altercentric modulation score was different from chance in the Aobj_pres first
order, t(47) = 4.581, p < .001; Cohen’s d = 0.661, Mdiff_A_obj_pres_first = 2.271 s, SD = 3.434,
95% CI = [1.274, 3.268], but not in the Aobj_abs first order, t(47) = .943, p = .35; Cohen’s d =
0.136, 95%, Mdiff_A_obj_abs_first = −0.423 s, SD = 3.109, CI = [−1.326, 0.479]. Shapiro-
Wilk tests showed no significant departure from normality, either on the entire sample,
W(96) = 0.988, p = .574, or on the two groups split by trial order, W(48) = 0.963, p =
.131 and W(48) = 0.984, p = .731 in Aobj_pres first and Aobj_abs first, respectively.
The effect of order on the altercentric modulation scores (i.e., on the difference between
trials) indicates that the two belief trials were significantly different from each other in one order
and not in another. To check whether the data pattern holds even when trial order cannot play a
role, we analyzed search times on the first trials between participants. A Shapiro-Wilk test
showed no significant departure from normality, W(96) = 0.982, p = .217. A univariate ANOVA
with condition (Object Absent / Object Present / Object Exchanged-Absent) and Type of first
l
D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d
f
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
i
r
e
c
t
.
m
i
t
.
/
e
d
u
o
p
m
i
/
l
a
r
t
i
c
e
-
p
d
f
/
d
o
i
/
i
/
.
/
1
0
1
1
6
2
o
p
m
_
a
_
0
0
0
5
0
2
0
3
6
0
6
7
o
p
m
_
a
_
0
0
0
5
0
p
d
/
.
i
f
b
y
g
u
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
Figure 2. Altercentric modulation scores (difference in search durations between Aobj_pres: Actor believes object is present and Aobj_abs:
Actor believes no object remained trials) in a) Experiment 1 (N = 96); and Experiment 2 (N = 64) split by whether infants passed the criterion
in baseline trials, and in b) Experiment 1 split by order of test trial. Boxes indicate interquartile range with median, whiskers show 1.5 times
the interquartile range, and dots show individual data points (horizontally jittered) (modified from (Allen et al., 2018). Asterisks indicate sig-
nificant difference from zero.
OPEN MIND: Discoveries in Cognitive Science
195
Altercentric Modulation in 14-Month-Old Infants
Kampis and Kovács
trial (Aobj_pres first or Aobj_abs first) as between-subject factors showed an effect of Type of
first trial, F(1, 90) = 4.901, p = .029, ηp
2 = .052. Infants who received an Aobj_pres trial (Actor
believes object present) on the very first trial searched significantly longer than those receiving
an Aobj_abs trial (Actor believes object absent) on the first trial, indicating that the effect of the
other’s belief on infants’ search manifested also when trial order could not play a role. Mean
raw search scores on the first trials were MA_obj_pres = 6.490 s, SD = 3.026 and MA_obj_abs =
5.042 s, SD = 3.374. There was no effect of condition, F(2, 90) = 0.228, p = .797, ηp
2 =
.005, and no interaction between type of trial and condition, F(2, 90) = 1.786, p = .174,
ηp
2 = .038.
Discussion
Infants searched longer when according to the Actor’s belief an object remained in the box,
compared to when she believed all had been retrieved. As infants’ belief about the box’s con-
tents was constant within the trial pairs, this difference arguably reflects the effect of the Actor’s
belief on infants’ behavior. The difference in modulation scores in the two presentation orders
could arise from the first trial being more sensitive to factors increasing search times (e.g., the
Actor’s belief in Aobj_pres), combined with children being less easily motivated to search later
on. Thus, two different effects may be working against each other: a decrease across trials in
motivation to search ( Van de Walle et al., 2000) and an effect of the other’s belief on infants’
search. The influence of the other’s belief on infants’ search times also holds in a between-
subject analysis of the first trials, confirming that the main effect stems from our conceptual
manipulation even when trial order cannot play a role.
Overall, these results show that infants tracked another person’s beliefs involving individ-
uation and tracking of multiple objects based on spatiotemporal and feature information.
Experiment 2 was set out to investigate whether infants ascribe to others’ beliefs involving
aspectuality (Perner et al., 2011)—that is, whether they are sensitive to the unique aspect
under which the other represents the objects.
EXPERIMENT 2
Whether infants are sensitive to the aspectuality of beliefs is of importance because a fully
developed theory of mind entails the ability to appreciate that belief representations reflect
some (but not all) aspects of the environment, from the observer’s own perspective (Perner
et al., 2011). As objects may have several distinct characteristics (e.g., a toy can be red, but
also make a rattling sound), which of these characteristics one is aware of will guide their
inferences regarding that object. Understanding others’ beliefs involving aspectuality has been
proposed to require complex representational abilities that emerge after the age of four, there-
fore such representations should posit a fundamental challenge to the infant mind (Butterfill &
Apperly, 2013; Rakoczy, 2017).
While recent evidence suggests at least by 18 months of age infants might successfully
track belief scenarios involving some forms of aspectuality (Buttelmann et al., 2015; Fizke
et al., 2017; Scott & Baillargeon, 2009), it is an open question whether infants grasp a funda-
mental inferential implication of understanding aspectuality: that another person’s partial
information about an object can lead her to be mistaken about the identity of objects, and
posit the existence of the two objects instead of one. We tested whether 14-month-old infants
understand beliefs relying on the person’s mistaken individuation of a single object with two
different aspects as two (thus holding a false belief about its identity), based on the aspect
(here: visual appearance) under which she perceives them. In first-person computations a
OPEN MIND: Discoveries in Cognitive Science
196
l
D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d
f
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
i
r
e
c
t
.
m
i
t
.
/
e
d
u
o
p
m
i
/
l
a
r
t
i
c
e
-
p
d
f
/
d
o
i
/
i
.
/
/
1
0
1
1
6
2
o
p
m
_
a
_
0
0
0
5
0
2
0
3
6
0
6
7
o
p
m
_
a
_
0
0
0
5
0
p
d
/
.
i
f
b
y
g
u
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
Altercentric Modulation in 14-Month-Old Infants
Kampis and Kovács
majority of 14-month-old infants could override their default assumption that different appear-
ances signal distinct objects, if they were shown that objects could have dual appearances
(Cacchione et al., 2013). Experiment 2 asked whether infants can use such inferences to rep-
resent another person’s belief about object identity. Considering that infants’ limitation to infer-
entially individuate objects from their own perspective may constrain them in attributing such
contents to others (in Cacchione et al., 2013, approximately 70% of infants showed the pre-
dicted behavior), we introduced two baseline trials to assess whether infants individuate
objects on the basis of their knowledge about the two appearances, and predicted that infants
who show this understanding would also successfully track similar events from the other per-
son’s perspective, and show altercentric modulation in belief trials.
Methods
Infants were first presented with two belief trials in counterbalanced order (randomly
assigned): true belief (Aobj_abs) and false belief (Aobj_pres) trials. Following this, they received
two baseline trials in fixed order: an unknown-transform (B:Iobj_pres) trial, then a known-
transform (B:Iobj_abs) trial. The fixed order of baseline trials was implemented in order to avoid
carryover from known-transform (B:Iobj_abs) trials (i.e., that infants would assume that all
objects may transform).
Participants
Sixty-four 14-month-old infants participated (age range from 14;2 to 15;3 mean age = 14;16).
Thirty-five additional infants were tested but not included in the analyses because of
passivity—they did not search in either of the belief test trials (13), they fussed out (15), or
due to parental interference or experimental error in the procedure (7). Sample size was deter-
mined as for Study 1. We aimed to have n = 32 infants who passed the baseline criterion as we
expected, specifically those infants to track the other’s belief and thus show an effect in the
belief trials.
Materials
We used a white cardboard box as in Experiment 1, but slightly larger in order to have a large
enough opening for the new objects (that were slightly bigger than in Experiment 1). As exper-
imental objects we used plush figures that could change their appearance via turning them
inside out. We used toys of somewhat different size, color, and material in baseline and test
trials, and in each individual trial a new toy was used that differed in appearance/category, to
minimize the risk that infants would assume that A is knowledgeable about the objects in sub-
sequent trials (for details see the Supplemental Materials).
Procedure
Familiarization Trials. The first two familiarization trials were identical to Experiment 1, but we
introduced a third familiarization that came after the two belief test trials and served to reen-
gage infants before the baseline trials.
In Experiment 2 in test trials, it was always the Confederate (C) who took out the
Test Trials.
objects from her bag, to avoid any suspicion children might have that the Actor (A) has knowl-
edge of the transforming feature of the objects. C took out an object, put it on the top of the
box, and named it. Then A repeated the label and put the object into the box. In Aobj_pres trials,
A left at this point. Then C retrieved the toy and demonstrated the transformation (while
OPEN MIND: Discoveries in Cognitive Science
197
l
D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d
f
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
i
r
e
c
t
.
m
i
t
.
/
e
d
u
o
p
m
i
/
l
a
r
t
i
c
e
-
p
d
f
/
d
o
i
/
i
/
.
/
1
0
1
1
6
2
o
p
m
_
a
_
0
0
0
5
0
2
0
3
6
0
6
7
o
p
m
_
a
_
0
0
0
5
0
p
d
.
/
i
f
b
y
g
u
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
Altercentric Modulation in 14-Month-Old Infants
Kampis and Kovács
labeling both appearances with different labels), and then put the object in its new form back
into the box. In Aobj_abs trials, A left at this point. Then in both trials A came back, sat down and
retrieved the toy in its new form, and put the toy away into a bag, followed by a measurement
period. In the end of the trials, C always demonstrated the reverse transformation when A was
present. After this the second test trial followed. Thus, in Aobj_abs trials, A knew there was only
one object with two identities, which was now retrieved, leaving the box empty; while in
Aobj_pres trials A must have thought there were two objects, one of which likely still remained
in the box.
Baseline Trials.
In baseline trials, C sat passively at the table. A took out an
Unknown Transform (B:Iobj_pres) trial.
object from her bag, named it, then put the object into the box, and then retrieved it in its
changed form (as the transformation was done invisibly to the child, inside the box), and then
put it away. Then a measurement period followed. If infants individuated two different objects
from the two appearances, they should search longer for the “remaining” one (while, in fact,
the box was empty).
In these trials, A did not do the transformation surreptitiously
Known Transform (B:Iobj_abs) trial.
inside the box, but retrieved the toy, showed the transformation, and put it back. Thus, if
infants followed the transformation, indicating that the two appearances belong to the same
object, when she later retrieved it in the new form, they knew that the box was emptied.
Coding
Search durations were coded as in Experiment 1. Twenty-five percent of infants (n = 16) were
coded on all four trials (unknown transform vs. known transform baseline trials, and Aobj_abs vs.
Aobj_pres test trials) by a second coder who was unaware of the purpose of the study; interrater
agreement was r(64) = .951, p < .001.
To determine whether infants made the predicted first-person inferences in baseline (that is,
whether they assume that one object is still present in the box when not seeing the transfor-
mation), we set a criterion that aimed to grasp a meaningful difference between search dura-
tions in the two baseline trials. Infants were considered to have “passed” the baseline criterion
if search duration on the unknown transform trials was equal or higher than the search dura-
tion on the known transform trial multiplied by the constant of 1.2, which was based on the
average ratio between search times in the two types of trials in Experiment 1. If infants did not
search at all in the known-transform baseline trial (which is considered a valid response), since
a value of zero cannot be multiplied to produce a meaningful minimum value for the
unknown transform trial, a minimum of 500-ms search duration in the unknown-transform
baseline was set to categorize an infant as “passer” (see details in the Supplemental
Materials).1
1 The minimum difference of 500 ms was a preset value aimed to approximate the shortest meaningful dura-
tion. Since search duration was coded from the moment when the child’s hand was inserted halfway into the
box, until the moment when it was halfway taken out, this duration arguably reflects an initiated
reaching/searching action. Importantly, however, the results are independent of whether we use the above-
defined criteria that are derived from Experiment 1, or conceptually similar criteria derived from earlier studies
(see the Supplemental Materials).
OPEN MIND: Discoveries in Cognitive Science
198
l
D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d
f
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
i
r
e
c
t
.
m
i
t
.
/
e
d
u
o
p
m
i
/
l
a
r
t
i
c
e
-
p
d
f
/
d
o
i
/
i
.
/
/
1
0
1
1
6
2
o
p
m
_
a
_
0
0
0
5
0
2
0
3
6
0
6
7
o
p
m
_
a
_
0
0
0
5
0
p
d
.
/
i
f
b
y
g
u
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
Altercentric Modulation in 14-Month-Old Infants
Kampis and Kovács
Results
We aimed at 32 infants who qualify as passing this baseline criterion, and 32 additional infants
finished the experiment but did not pass baseline. In accordance with our criterion, in the passing
group infants searched longer on B:Iobj_pres trials than in B:Iobj_abs trials (MB:I_obj_pres = 5.224 s,
SD = 4.056; MB:I_obj_abs = 1.577 s, SD = 1.904). This was not the case in the “nonpassing” group,
where infants in fact searched longer on B:Iobj_abs trials than on B:Iobj_pres trials (MB:I_obj_pres =
2.419 s, SD = 3.843; MB:I_obj_abs = 3.361 s, SD = 4.207).
To test the prediction that particularly those infants who show evidence of individuating
objects on the basis of their own knowledge about the two appearances of an object in the
baseline trials, would also show an altercentric modulation effect taking into account the
aspect under which A saw the object; for the main analysis we analyzed infants’ search times
who have passed the baseline criterion. In the group who passed baseline (n = 32), infants
searched on average longer on Aobj_pres trials than on Aobj_abs trials (Mdiff_passing = 1.345 s,
SD = 3.208; see Figure 2); and a one-sample t test showed that this modulation score was
significantly different from chance, t(31) = 2.371, p = .024; Cohen’s d = 0.419, 95% CI =
[0.188, 2.501]. We then split infants based on the order of test trial and compared modulation
scores in the two test orders (Aobj_pres first vs. Aobj_abs first), t(30) = 1.914, p = .065; Cohen’s d =
0.676, 95%, MA_obj_pres_first = 2.386, SD = 2.76, MA_obj_abs_first = .303, SD = 3.363, 95% CI =
[−0.139, 4.305]; see the Supplemental Materials for further analyses and raw search times.
To compare the number of infants who show the altercentric modulation effect in the passing
baseline and the nonpassing groups, we applied the same criterion for the test trials as to the
baseline trials and categorized the entire sample of infants in Experiment 2 into “shows alter-
centric effect” in test and “no effect” in test. Infants who searched 1.2 times longer in Aobj_pres
than in Aobj_abs test trial, or at least 500 ms in Aobj_pres if they didn’t search in Aobj_abs, were cat-
egorized as “shows altercentric effect.” A chi-square test showed that significantly more infants
were categorized as “shows altercentric effect” in the passing baseline group, χ 2(1, N = 64) =
5.067, p = .045. Thus, applying the same criteria in test trials as in baseline trials indicated a
significant relation between passing baseline and showing an altercentric effect.
Additionally, to provide convergent evidence that infants’ performance on baseline was
related to the altercentric modulation in test trials, we correlated difference scores from base-
line trials with the altercentric modulation scores from test trials, which revealed a significant
positive correlation between the two (r = .258, n = 64, p = .04). Together, these results give us
confidence that while the passing baseline criterion is novel as it was determined for the pur-
pose of this study, it is a reliable indicator of whether infants demonstrated an ability of under-
standing the dual identity objects and the scenario from their first-person perspective, which in
turn was related to how they processed the scenarios taking into account the perspective of
another person and the aspect under which he or she represented these objects.
As passing baseline as a criterion served to select a group of infants who do understand and
track the events from their own perspective, one might wish to be cautious to make claims
about the nonpassing group’s potential inability to do so. Nevertheless, as it may be informa-
tive for future research, we analyzed infants’ behavior in the nonpassing group as well. In the
nonpassing group the altercentric modulation score was not significantly different from
chance, Mdiff_nonpassing = −0.428 s, SD = 3.927, t(31) = 0.617, p = .542; Cohen’s d = 0.109,
95% CI = [−1.844, 0.987], and an independent-samples t test comparing the two test orders
(Aobj_pres first vs. Aobj_abs first) showed no difference, t(30) = 1.160, p = .255; Cohen’s d =
0.402, MA_obj_pres_first = .424, SD = 4.889, MA_obj_abs_first = −1.181, SD = 2.77, 95% CI =
[−1.221, 4.429]. Shapiro-Wilk tests showed no significant departure from normality, either
OPEN MIND: Discoveries in Cognitive Science
199
l
D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d
f
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
i
r
e
c
t
.
m
i
t
.
/
e
d
u
o
p
m
i
/
l
a
r
t
i
c
e
-
p
d
f
/
d
o
i
/
i
/
.
/
1
0
1
1
6
2
o
p
m
_
a
_
0
0
0
5
0
2
0
3
6
0
6
7
o
p
m
_
a
_
0
0
0
5
0
p
d
/
.
i
f
b
y
g
u
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
Altercentric Modulation in 14-Month-Old Infants
Kampis and Kovács
in the baseline passing group, W(32) = 0.964, p = .345, or in the nonpassing group, W(32) =
0.958, p = .246. We then analyzed altercentric modulation in a univariate ANOVA with pass-
ing baseline (passing / nonpassing) as between-subject factors. Altercentric modulation scores
were Mdiff_passing = 1.345 s (SD = 3.208) in the passing baseline group and Mdiff_nonpassing =
−0.428 s (SD = 3.927) in the nonpassing, effect of passing was F(1, 64) = 3.913, p = .052,
ηp
2 = .059.
In sum, we identified infants who varied their searching behavior depending on their own
knowledge about the object’s identity in the respective baseline trials, thus demonstrating evi-
dence of tracking the events from their first-person perspective. Crucially, infants in this
baseline-passing group searched longer in the box when according to the other person’s (false)
belief there were two separate objects, and after the removal of an object she believed that one
object remained in the box (Aobj_pres trials); compared to when she knew that there is only one
object with two appearances, and therefore believed that in the end all objects have been
retrieved (Aobj_abs trials).
Discussion
Experiment 2 showed that 14-month-old infants who are sensitive to the dual identity of
objects in first-person representations also spontaneously tracked others’ beliefs about object
identity, which modulated their duration of search in the box. Therefore, in contrast with
recent proposals (Apperly & Butterfill, 2009), we provide evidence suggesting that computing
others’ beliefs involving aspectuality may occur spontaneously and emerge early in develop-
ment. Another study using an interactive helping task did not find evidence in toddlers for
understanding false beliefs involving aspectuality (Fizke et al., 2017). However, the helping
task differs in many aspects from the current task. For example, the continuous measure in
our task may be more sensitive to capture these phenomena than the binary assessment in
the helping task. Additionally, in our study infants who failed to grasp aspectuality from a
first-person perspective also showed no evidence of belief attribution, and such factors may
overshadow children’s sociocognitive abilities in other tasks too. Infants’ limitations in belief
attribution may therefore at least in part come from limitations of their developing cognitive
systems used in first-person reasoning—a possibility also supported by the correlation between
infants’ behavior on the baseline and belief trials.
The intuitive prediction is that when it comes to complex third-person inferences, giving
infants training in a specific first-person inference would also have an effect on infants’ under-
standing of others’ beliefs involving the same domain. For instance, while infants younger than
11.5 months usually pay little attention to the objects’ color compared to their shape ( Wilcox,
1999), training them with the importance of color information in object individuation may also
facilitate their understanding that others may use color information for individuation. Whether
such effects are indeed observable in various domains and how fast such transfers may occur
is a matter for future studies.
The current results support the possibility that infants can entertain various types of belief
contents. Experiment 1 involved tracking the presence of an object form the other’s perspec-
tive (Object Absent condition) and its features (Object Absent-Exchanged condition), and
potentially the absence of an object from the other’s point of view (Object Present condition).
In Experiment 2, infants’ behavior suggested that those infants who appreciate the dual identity
of objects from their own perspective can also track beliefs that can only be represented via
grasping the aspectuality of mental representations. Such sensitivity to the other person’s belief
involving aspectuality are difficult to explain with minimal mindreading accounts such as
OPEN MIND: Discoveries in Cognitive Science
200
l
D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d
f
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
i
r
e
c
t
.
m
i
t
.
/
e
d
u
o
p
m
i
/
l
a
r
t
i
c
e
-
p
d
f
/
d
o
i
/
i
/
.
/
1
0
1
1
6
2
o
p
m
_
a
_
0
0
0
5
0
2
0
3
6
0
6
7
o
p
m
_
a
_
0
0
0
5
0
p
d
.
/
i
f
b
y
g
u
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
Altercentric Modulation in 14-Month-Old Infants
Kampis and Kovács
encoding belief-like states or registrations, as these have been proposed to involve agent–
object relations that cannot deal with identity mistakes (Butterfill & Apperly, 2013), thus indi-
cating that the ability to encode beliefs proper (Perner et al., 2011; Rakoczy, 2017) may be
present early on. We also see no obvious ways to explain infants’ behavior on Experiments 1
and 2 with alternative mechanisms that would originate from differences in procedure
between the trial types (Heyes, 2014). In each condition, the Actor leaves in both trials, she
is away for a short period of time, and comes back in both types of trials directly before her
retrieval of the object, immediately followed by the measurement period. Arguably, these two
events (the Actor’s departure and return) are of comparable saliency, as neither occur in famil-
iarization, and both direct infants’ attention away briefly from the box, thus they would cause
comparable distraction, if any. Any explanation pertaining to attentional effects (as described
in Heyes, 2014) would therefore lead to conflicting predictions with regard to the potential
type of interference (retroactive or proactive) caused by the timing of two events (the Actor’s
departure and her arrival) in the two trial types (true and false belief ). For example, a proactive
interference caused by the agent’s departure would predict that infants in false belief forget the
change that happened in her absence, but crucially, the very same process triggered by the
agent’s return would cause infants in both conditions not to remember that the agent subse-
quently took out an object from the box, leading to unclear predictions concerning search
times in the two trial types.2 A retroactive interference triggered by the agent’s return would
predict that infants forget what happened in her absence in false belief (the critical manipula-
tion of adding/removing/transforming the object), but the same process would also predict that
in true belief due to her departure infants should forget the event that happened before (again,
the critical manipulation of adding/removing/transforming the object), thus overall predicting
no differences between the trial types. We see no a priori reason based on which one could
predict which type of attentional bias should occur in the present paradigm and applying them
together lead to the above contradictory predictions. Finally, any explanation pertaining to
low-level nonmentalistic effects should have led to a bias manifesting in differences between
trials in Experiment 2 in the nonpassing group as well, where we did not observe any differ-
ences. These considerations together make submentalizing explanations unlikely.
Infants may recruit different potential cognitive mechanisms for solving such tasks that are
compatible with our findings. On one hand, Southgate (2020) argues that an altercentric bias
can be realized via mechanisms that do not entail attributing a representation to the other but
encode the state of affairs congruent with the other’s perspective as stronger than their own. At
the same time, an altercentric influence is arguably also compatible with metarepresentations
and belief attribution, where the other’s perspective receives a considerable weight and thus
influences one’s own behavior. Our findings do not differentiate between these alternatives.
While more converging evidence is needed to reach a verdict on the sophistication of infant
ToM, the present study provides strong motivation for further investigations.
GENERAL DISCUSSION
Two experiments asked whether 14-month-old infants show altercentric modulation in an
active behavioral task. Results showed that infants searched longer in a box when another
person believed it contains an object, compared to when he or she believed that all had been
2 Since in both conditions at least one object would remain according to infants’ memory, arguably in both
trials they would have reasons to search. To our knowledge all versions of the search task in the literature used a
comparison between 1 and 0 objects, as it is unclear whether infants should search longer if two objects are
hidden or one. As such, this explanation leads to at least uncertain predictions, but most likely null findings
between the two trial types.
OPEN MIND: Discoveries in Cognitive Science
201
l
D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d
f
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
i
r
e
c
t
.
m
i
t
.
/
e
d
u
o
p
m
i
/
l
a
r
t
i
c
e
-
p
d
f
/
d
o
i
/
i
/
/
.
1
0
1
1
6
2
o
p
m
_
a
_
0
0
0
5
0
2
0
3
6
0
6
7
o
p
m
_
a
_
0
0
0
5
0
p
d
.
/
i
f
b
y
g
u
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
Altercentric Modulation in 14-Month-Old Infants
Kampis and Kovács
retrieved. Infants’ own knowledge was identical in the two trials, therefore, the observed dif-
ferences should be due to the other person’s belief about the content of the box.
This altercentric modulation is consistent with other studies showing that infants’ (Kovács
et al., 2010) and adults’ (Freundlieb et al., 2016; Samson et al., 2010) behavior can be influ-
enced by another agent’s belief or visual perspective. However, it also extends previous find-
ings in two significant ways. First, the present scenarios are novel in that successful belief
attribution required individuating and tracking multiple objects, and their appearance or
identity. The current results therefore support the possibility that from early on infants can
entertain various types of belief contents, including beliefs that involve appreciating the
aspectuality of mental representations. Second, we found altercentric modulation in an
active everyday behavior (searching) in early infancy, at an age at which, to our knowledge,
there are no published reports documenting such effects. While looking time results (Kovács
et al., 2010) indicate that infants’ attention can be modulated by others’ perspective, it was
an open question whether they also manifest in infants’ consequent action planning. The
fact that altercentrism affects infants’ active behavior speaks to the possibility that the phe-
nomenon documented here is not simply a local, attention-directing mechanism but seems
to be integrated into further processes, for instance, in those that control infants’ actions
(Rakoczy, 2012).
While these results suggest that infants encoded the other person’s belief, at the same
time they also open up questions regarding the relation between infants’ own representations
and those of the Actor. While there was an effect of the other person’s belief (infants
searched longer when the Actor believed an object remained in the box than when she
believed it to be empty), there were seemingly no effects of the infants’ own beliefs between
conditions in Experiment 1, as there was no overall difference between the conditions where
an object was present and where no objects were present, though this may be in part due
the lack of power for between-subjects comparisons in our sample. However, the present
paradigm is not optimally suitable for such comparisons, as search times reflect a continuous
measure of infants’ motivation to search, based on their own representation and that of the
other. Differences in search time therefore show an influence of the other’s perspective,
affecting infants’ response that is based on their own representation—therefore not necessar-
ily overriding infants’ own representations but rather modulating them. Similar effects can
sometimes be observed when after we learn some information, which later becomes discre-
dited as it turns out to be a misinformation, it may nevertheless continue to influence our
judgments (Ecker et al., 2010). As such, the current study was not designed directly to pit
against each other infants’ own representations vs. those they form based on the other’s per-
spective (Southgate, 2020). We suggest that this question can be more suitably probed by
designs where infants are presented with a binary choice, for example, to retrieve an object
from location A or B, and assessed whether they select the location corresponding to their
own memory or that of the other person. Recently, Kovács and colleagues (Kovács et al.,
2021) found that infants search for an object where another person believes it to be if they
themselves are not knowledgeable about the actual location of the object. A strong predic-
tion would be that young infants may search for the object where the other person believes
the object to be even if they had seen it to be moved elsewhere. The current results indicate
that infants may be particularly prone to attend to another person’s perspective, and conse-
quently the other’s belief affects their behavior to the extent that it might even outweigh their
own representations (Southgate, 2020). An intriguing question remains how first-person and
third-person (attributed) representations are separated, and how altercentric modulation may
change over development.
OPEN MIND: Discoveries in Cognitive Science
202
l
D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d
f
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
i
r
e
c
t
.
m
i
t
.
/
e
d
u
o
p
m
i
/
l
a
r
t
i
c
e
-
p
d
f
/
d
o
i
/
i
/
.
/
1
0
1
1
6
2
o
p
m
_
a
_
0
0
0
5
0
2
0
3
6
0
6
7
o
p
m
_
a
_
0
0
0
5
0
p
d
/
.
i
f
b
y
g
u
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
Altercentric Modulation in 14-Month-Old Infants
Kampis and Kovács
In adults, altercentric effects are typically considered akin to a byproduct of our generic
heightened sociality or an indication of spontaneous perspective taking, likely facilitating
interpersonal coordination (Gallotti & Frith, 2013). From a developmental perspective, how-
ever, it could be advantageous to have a disposition to attend to others’ point of view from
early on (Kampis et al., 2013; Southgate, 2020). Infants face a crucial learning problem, and
the social environment is a useful source to select the most relevant sources of information. On
one hand, attention to others’ perspective and beliefs would allow infants to learn about
others, enabling infants to take part in social interactions with increasing success, via action
coordination, action interpretation, and action prediction. On the other hand, such a sensitiv-
ity would also allow infants to learn about the material world through the lenses of others
(Kampis et al., 2013). Kampis et al. (2013) found that 10-month-olds readily applied a prefer-
ence they learned about one agent (preferring one object over another) also to another, novel
agent; and argued that infants have treated the content of the other’s preference as universally
applicable, generic information attached to the object. Thus, sensitivity to others’ mental states
may serve a dual function early in human ontogeny, enabling infants both to learn about
others, as well as to learn about the world via the perspective of others around them.
While altercentrism in general may serve a learning function by attuning infants to take
others’ point of view, in the current studies it led to a seemingly suboptimal behavior: infants
tended to search more even though they had reasons to believe there is no object present, and
search less when there was in fact an object remaining, due to the influence of the other per-
son’s perspective. As infants are typically surrounded by individuals who are more knowledge-
able than themselves, a sensitivity to their perspective is likely to be generally advantageous.
Such a disposition, however, can also manifest in signature biases such as ones observed in the
false belief scenarios in the current study. Even in adults, altercentric influence can appear
both as interference and as facilitatory with regard to one’s immediate task or goals. Sometimes
we experience interference or intrusion where our judgment slows down or is more error-
prone due to the influence of the other’s perspective (Elekes, Varga, & Király, 2016; Freundlieb
et al., 2018; Surtees et al., 2016). Other times it has facilitatory effects when we observe some-
thing together with others, increasing our perceptual sensitivity, enabling faster detection of
objects that appear in our environment, or leading to better remembering of items (He
et al., 2011; Kovács et al., 2010; Seow & Fleming, 2019). It is an open question whether infants
in our study could inhibit the other’s influence, for example, if they had a strong motivation to
focus on their own perspective only. This could be probed by making the objects highly
rewarding, or searching effortful, or by introducing alternative activities infants may choose
to do instead of attending to the box. On the other hand, reducing the influence of the other
may also be related to the capacity for self-other distinction. For example, adults show less
interference in an imitation inhibition task when they are primed with self-related words or
look in the mirror prior to the task (Spengler et al., 2010), indicating that a heightened focus
on ourselves may make us less prone to altercentric interference. In a learning context, know-
ing when not to take over a piece of information from others is just as essential as being
attuned to them. It is an open question whether an increased focus on themselves can be elic-
ited in infants similarly as in adults, and whether it would lead to less influence of others’ per-
spective on their subsequent behavior.
A privileged status of others’ perspective in infancy also raises the question how infants
select who to attend to, for example, in scenarios with multiple “others” with differing perspec-
tives. We suggest that it is related to the broader subject of whose perspective and beliefs peo-
ple track as well as to other domains of social cognition regarding whose actions we predict or
whose goals we keep track of. There, too, likely there are selection mechanisms controlling
OPEN MIND: Discoveries in Cognitive Science
203
l
D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d
f
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
i
r
e
c
t
.
m
i
t
.
/
e
d
u
o
p
m
i
/
l
a
r
t
i
c
e
-
p
d
f
/
d
o
i
/
i
.
/
/
1
0
1
1
6
2
o
p
m
_
a
_
0
0
0
5
0
2
0
3
6
0
6
7
o
p
m
_
a
_
0
0
0
5
0
p
d
/
.
i
f
b
y
g
u
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
Altercentric Modulation in 14-Month-Old Infants
Kampis and Kovács
whom we spend mental resources on in our environment. For infants, an important one is likely
the relative relevance of those present around them (for a discussion, see also Southgate, 2020).
For example, they are probably more likely to track the perspective of an interaction partner than
a stranger or a bystander. Whether the partner is an in-group or out-group member may also
influence altercentric effects on one’s judgments (Simpson & Todd, 2017), and altercentric
effects are reduced when the other differs in age from the respondent (Ferguson et al., 2018).
The current experiments implemented a design in which the main experimenter (E1/Actor) inter-
acted the most with the child, and she also hid and retrieved the objects, making tracking her
mental state about these objects relevant. The Confederate was present throughout, equally
familiar but was passively sitting at the table. In many false belief tasks where there are multiple
agents (and the caretaker is also typically present), there is a similar issue: either it is not as costly
to track multiple perspectives, or studies have (perhaps unknowingly) managed to implement
dynamics that make participants focus on one agent over another. Finally, another factor deter-
mining whose perspective infants attend to may be whose perspective differs from the infant’s. In
the present study, the perspective of the other experimenter (E2) and that of the caregiver was
congruent with the infant’s own perspective, therefore would not differentiate the critical trials. It
is possible that a perspective that is identical with that of the infant may not be encoded as a
belief (but rather as knowledge; see e.g., Dudley & Kovács, 2021; Phillips et al., 2021) and
may not result in similar effects. It may also be that in case there are multiple other perspectives
in a scene, the different perspectives of others may be privileged over the identical ones.
How handling multiple other-perspectives is achieved is underexplored even in adults.
Some have found no altercentric effects when people observed multiple avatars with consis-
tent or inconsistent perspective to each other, but always inconsistent with the participant’s
perspective (Capozzi et al., 2014). Egocentric mistakes, however, remained—suggesting that
there was some self-other interference even when two others’ perspectives were inconsistent
with each other. An intriguing, related question is how to characterize handling self vs. other
perspective and the relation between egocentric and altercentric cognition. While seemingly
contradictory processes, egocentric and altercentric influence may not be mutually exclusive.
Within the same scenario, one’s own point of view can influence how we make judgment of
others’ perspective and vice versa; and depending on the context their relative weight, or
which is easier to compute, may change (Kampis & Southgate, 2020, Box 4).
Further questions for future work remain whether altercentric effects would generalize to a
variety of different populations (e.g., non-WEIRD societies, Henrich et al., 2010). Relatedly, the
phylogenetic origins of altercentrism have yet to be uncovered. Recent evidence indicates that
nonhuman apes and monkeys predict others’ actions based on their beliefs (Hayashi et al., 2020;
Krupenye et al., 2016), and consequently some proposals have drawn strong parallels between
apes’ and human infants’ sociocognitive abilities (Apperly & Butterfill, 2009; Tomasello, 2018).
Yet, at least two aspects of the current findings suggest that such conclusions may be premature,
as to our knowledge no altercentric effects have been demonstrated in nonhuman animals
(Martin & Santos, 2014), and there is no evidence for the understanding of aspectuality of beliefs
in any other species. The fact that human infants adopt the other’s perspective so readily points
to a strong tendency to spontaneously focus on the other’s mental states and raises the crucial
question whether the altercentric tendency of humans may be a species-unique phenomenon.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors thank the participating families; research assistants Borbála Köllőd, Eszter
Körtvélyesi, Szilvia Takács, Iulia Savos, Karap Zsuzsanna, and others at the Cognitive
OPEN MIND: Discoveries in Cognitive Science
204
l
D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d
f
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
i
r
e
c
t
.
m
i
t
.
/
e
d
u
o
p
m
i
/
l
a
r
t
i
c
e
-
p
d
f
/
d
o
i
/
i
/
.
/
1
0
1
1
6
2
o
p
m
_
a
_
0
0
0
5
0
2
0
3
6
0
6
7
o
p
m
_
a
_
0
0
0
5
0
p
d
.
/
i
f
b
y
g
u
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
Altercentric Modulation in 14-Month-Old Infants
Kampis and Kovács
Development Center, CEU, for their help with the many hours of data collection; Ildikó Király,
Mikołaj Hernik, Gergely Csibra, and Victoria Southgate for discussions and input on earlier
versions of the manuscript; and two reviewers whose constructive comments helped us improve
this paper. This publication is the result of research conducted for Central European University,
Private University – CEU GmbH. It was made possible by the CEU Open Access Fund.
FUNDING INFORMATION
AMK, FP7 Ideas: European Research Council (https://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100011199), Award
ID: 284236-REPCOLLAB. AMK, James S. McDonnell Foundation (https://dx.doi.org/10.13039
/100000913), Award ID: 220020449.
AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS
DK: Conceptualization: Equal; Formal analysis: Lead; Methodology: Lead; Visualization: Lead;
Writing - Original Draft: Lead; Writing - Review & Editing: Equal. AMK: Conceptualization:
Equal; Formal analysis: Supporting; Methodology: Supporting; Visualization: Supporting;
Writing - Original Draft: Supporting; Writing - Review & Editing: Equal, Supervision: Lead.
REFERENCES
Allen, M., Poggiali, D., Whitaker, K., Marshall, T. R., & Kievit, R.
(2018). Raincloud plots: A multi-platform tool for robust data
visualization. PeerJ Preprints. https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj
.preprints.27137v1
Apperly, I. A., & Butterfill, S. A. (2009). Do humans have two sys-
tems to track beliefs and belief-like states? Psychological Review,
116(4), 953–970. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0016923, PubMed:
19839692
Baillargeon, R., Buttelmann, D., & Southgate, V. (2018a). Invited
commentary: Interpreting failed replications of early false-belief
findings: Methodological and theoretical considerations. Cogni-
tive Development, 46(May), 112–124. https://doi.org/10.1016/j
.cogdev.2018.06.001
Baillargeon, R., Buttelmann, D., & Southgate, V. (2018b). Invited
commentary: Interpreting failed replications of early false-belief
findings: Methodological and theoretical considerations. Cogni-
tive Development, 46(May), 112–124. https://doi.org/10.1016/j
.cogdev.2018.06.001
Baillargeon, R., Scott, R. M., & He, Z. (2010). False-belief understand-
ing in infants. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 14(3), 110–118. https://
doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2009.12.006, PubMed: 20106714
Baldwin, D. A. (1991). Infants’ contribution to the achievement of
joint reference. Child Development, 62(5), 875–890. https://doi
.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.1991.tb01577.x, PubMed: 1756664
Barone, P., Corradi, G., & Gomila, A. (2019). Infants’ performance
in spontaneous-response false belief tasks: A review and
meta-analysis. Infant Behavior and Development, 57(February),
Article 101350. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infbeh.2019.101350,
PubMed: 31445431
Birch, S. A. J., & Bloom, P. (2004). Understanding children’s and
adults’ limitations in mental state reasoning. Trends in Cognitive
Sciences, 8(6), 255–260. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2004.04
.011, PubMed: 15165550
Buttelmann, F., & Buttelmann, D. (2017). The influence of a bystander
agent’s beliefs on children’s and adults’ decision-making process.
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 153, 126–139. https://
doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2016.09.006, PubMed: 27741442
Buttelmann, F., Suhrke, J., & Buttelmann, D. (2015). What you get is
what you believe: Eighteen-month-olds demonstrate belief
understanding in an unexpected-identity task. Journal of Experi-
mental Child Psychology, 131, 94–103. https://doi.org/10.1016/j
.jecp.2014.11.009, PubMed: 25544393
Butterfill, S. A., & Apperly, I. A. (2013). How to construct a minimal
theory of mind. Mind and Language, 28(5), 606–637. https://doi
.org/10.1111/mila.12036
Cacchione, T., Schaub, S., & Rakoczy, H. (2013). Fourteen-month-
old infants infer the continuous identity of objects on the basis of
nonvisible causal properties. Developmental Psychology, 49(7),
1325–1329. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0029746, PubMed:
22906060
Capozzi, F., Cavallo, A., Furlanetto, T., & Becchio, C. (2014). Alter-
centric intrusions from multiple perspectives: Beyond dyads.
PLoS ONE, 9(12), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone
.0114210, PubMed: 25436911
Carruthers, P. (2013). Mindreading in infancy. Mind & Language,
28(2), 141–172. https://doi.org/10.1111/mila.12014
Dudley, R., & Kovács, Á. (2021). Do “knowledge attributions”
involve metarepresentation just like belief attributions do? Behav-
ioral and Brain Sciences, 44, Article E149. https://doi.org/10
.1017/S0140525X20001594, PubMed: 34796829
Ecker, U. K. H., Lewandowsky, S., & Tang, D. T. W. (2010). Explicit
warnings reduce but do not eliminate the continued influence of
misinformation. Memory and Cognition, 38(8), 1087–1100.
https://doi.org/10.3758/MC.38.8.1087, PubMed: 21156872
Egyed, K., Király, I., & Gergely, G. (2013). Communicating shared
knowledge in infancy. Psychological Science, 24, 1348–1353.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797612471952, PubMed:
23719664
el Kaddouri, R., Bardi, L., de Bremaeker, D., Brass, M., & Wiersema,
J. R. (2019). Measuring spontaneous mentalizing with a ball
detection task: putting the attention-check hypothesis by Phillips
and colleagues (2015) to the test. Psychological Research, 84,
1749–1757. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-019-01181-7,
PubMed: 30976921
OPEN MIND: Discoveries in Cognitive Science
205
l
D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d
f
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
i
r
e
c
t
.
m
i
t
.
/
e
d
u
o
p
m
i
/
l
a
r
t
i
c
e
-
p
d
f
/
d
o
i
/
i
/
/
.
1
0
1
1
6
2
o
p
m
_
a
_
0
0
0
5
0
2
0
3
6
0
6
7
o
p
m
_
a
_
0
0
0
5
0
p
d
.
/
i
f
b
y
g
u
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
Altercentric Modulation in 14-Month-Old Infants
Kampis and Kovács
Elekes, F., Bródy, G., Halász, E., & Király, I. (2016). Enhanced
encoding of the co-actor’s target stimuli during a shared
non-motor task. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology,
69(12), 2376–2389. https://doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2015
.1120332, PubMed: 26624868
Elekes, F., Varga, M., & Király, I. (2016). Evidence for spontaneous
level-2 perspective taking in adults. Consciousness and Cogni-
tion, 41, 93–103. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2016.02
.010, PubMed: 26897297
Elekes, F., Varga, M., & Király,
(2017). Level-2 perspectives
I.
computed quickly and spontaneously: Evidence from eight-
to 9.5-year-old children. British Journal of Developmental Psy-
chology, 35(4), 609–622. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjdp.12201,
PubMed: 28833301
Feigenson, L., & Carey, S. (2003). Tracking individuals via
object-files: Evidence from infants’ manual search. Developmen-
tal Science, 6(5), 568–584. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-7687
.00313
Feigenson, L., & Halberda, J. (2008). Conceptual knowledge
increases infants’ memory capacity. Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 105(29),
9926–9930. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0709884105,
PubMed: 18626025
Ferguson, H. J., Brunsdon, V. E. A., & Bradford, E. E. F. (2018).
Age of avatar modulates the altercentric bias in a visual
perspective-taking task: ERP and behavioral evidence. Cognitive,
Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience, 18(6), 1298–1319. https://
doi.org/10.3758/s13415-018-0641-1, PubMed: 30242574
Fizke, E., Butterfill, S., van de Loo, L., Reindl, E., & Rakoczy, H.
(2017). Are there signature limits in early theory of mind? Journal
of Experimental Child Psychology, 162, 209–224. https://doi.org
/10.1016/j.jecp.2017.05.005, PubMed: 28623778
Freundlieb, M., Kovács, Á. M., & Sebanz, N. (2016). When do
humans spontaneously adopt another’s visuospatial perspective?
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Per-
formance, 42(3), 401–412. https://doi.org/10.1037/xhp0000153,
PubMed: 26480249
Freundlieb, M., Kovács, Á. M., & Sebanz, N. (2018). Reading your
mind while you are reading—Evidence for spontaneous visuo-
spatial perspective taking during a semantic categorization task.
Psychological Science, 29(4), 614–622. https://doi.org/10.1177
/0956797617740973, PubMed: 29447070
Gallotti, M., & Frith, C. D. (2013). Social cognition in the we-mode.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 17(4), 160–165. https://doi.org/10
.1016/j.tics.2013.02.002, PubMed: 23499335
Hanna, J. E., Tanenhaus, M. K., & Trueswell, J. C. (2003). The
effects of common ground and perspective on domains of refer-
ential interpretation. Journal of Memory and Language, 49(1),
43–61. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0749-596X(03)00022-6
Hayashi, T., Akikawa, R., Kawasaki, K., Egawa, J., Minamimoto, T.,
Kobayashi, K., Kato, S., Hori, Y., Nagai, Y., Iijima, A., Someya, T.,
& Hasegawa, I. (2020). Macaques exhibit implicit gaze bias
anticipating others’ false-belief-driven actions via medial prefron-
tal cortex. Cell Reports, 30(13), 4433–4444.e5. https://doi.org/10
.1016/j.celrep.2020.03.013, PubMed: 32234478
He, X., Lever, A. G., & Humphreys, G. W. (2011). Interpersonal
memory-based guidance of attention is reduced for ingroup
members. Experimental Brain Research, 211(3–4), 429–438.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-011-2698-8, PubMed: 21519911
Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest
people in the world? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33(2–3),
61–83. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X0999152X, PubMed:
20550733
Herrmann, E., Call, J., Hernàndez-Lloreda, M. V., Hare, B., &
Tomasello, M. (2007). Humans have evolved specialized skills
of social cognition: The cultural intelligence hypothesis. Science,
317(5843), 1360–1366. https://doi.org/10.1126/science
.1146282, PubMed: 17823346
Heyes, C. (2014). False belief in infancy: A fresh look. Develop-
mental Science, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.12148,
PubMed: 24666559
Kampis, D., Buttelmann, F., & Kovács, Á. M. (2020). Developing a
theory of mind: Are infants sensitive to how other people repre-
sent the world? In The social brain: A developmental perspective
(Issue 1978, pp. 143–160). MIT Press.
Kampis, D., Parise, E., Csibra, G., & Kovács, Á. M. (2015). Neural
signatures for sustaining object representations attributed to
others in preverbal human infants. Proceedings of the Royal Soci-
ety B: Biological Sciences, 282(1819), 0–1. https://doi.org/10
.1098/rspb.2015.1683, PubMed: 26559949
Kampis, D., Somogyi, E., Itakura, S., & Király, I. (2013). Do infants
bind mental states to agents? Cognition, 129(2), 232–240.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2013.07.004, PubMed:
23942349
Kampis, D., & Southgate, V. (2020). Altercentric cognition: How
others influence our cognitive processing. Trends in Cognitive
Sciences, 24(11), 944–959. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2020
.09.003, PubMed: 32981846
Keysar, B., Lin, S., & Barr, D. J. (2003). Limits on theory of mind use
in adults. Cognition, 89(1), 25–41. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0010
-0277(03)00064-7
Király, I., Oláh, K., Csibra, G., & Kovács, Á. M. (2018). Retrospec-
tive attribution of false beliefs in 3-year-old children. Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(45), 11477–11482.
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1803505115, PubMed: 30322932
Kovács, Á. M., Téglás, E., & Csibra, G. (2021). Can infants adopt
underspecified contents into attributed beliefs? Representational
prerequisites of theory of mind. Cognition. https://doi.org/10
.1016/j.cognition.2021.104640, PubMed: 33757642
Kovács, Á. M., Téglás, E., & Endress, A. D. (2010). The social sense:
Susceptibility to others’ beliefs in human infants and adults. Sci-
ence, 330(6012), 1830–1834. https://doi.org/10.1126/science
.1190792, PubMed: 21205671
Krupenye, C., Kano, F., Hirata, S., Call, J., & Tomasello, M. (2016).
Great apes anticipate that other individuals will act according to
false beliefs. Science, 354(6308), 110–114. https://doi.org/10
.1126/science.aaf8110, PubMed: 27846501
Kulke, L., & Rakoczy, H. (2018). Implicit Theory of Mind—An over-
view of current replications and non-replications. Data in Brief,
16, 101–104. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dib.2017.11.016,
PubMed: 29188228
Martin, A., & Santos, L. R. (2014). The origins of belief representa-
tion: Monkeys fail to automatically represent others’ beliefs. Cog-
nition, 130(3), 300–308. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition
.2013.11.016, PubMed: 24374209
Milward, S. J., Kita, S., & Apperly, I. A. (2014). The development of
co-representation effects in a joint task: Do children represent a
co-actor? Cognition, 132(3), 269–279. https://doi.org/10.1016/j
.cognition.2014.04.008, PubMed: 24853630
Nickerson, R. S. (1999). How we know—And sometimes
misjudge—What others know: Imputing one’s own knowledge
to others. Psychological Bulletin, 125(6), 737–759. https://doi
.org/10.1037/0033-2909.125.6.737
Perner, J., Mauer, M. C., & Hildenbrand, M. (2011). Identity: Key to
children’s understanding of belief. Science, 333(6041), 474–477.
https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1201216, PubMed: 21778403
OPEN MIND: Discoveries in Cognitive Science
206
l
D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d
f
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
i
r
e
c
t
.
m
i
t
.
/
e
d
u
o
p
m
i
/
l
a
r
t
i
c
e
-
p
d
f
/
d
o
i
/
i
/
/
.
1
0
1
1
6
2
o
p
m
_
a
_
0
0
0
5
0
2
0
3
6
0
6
7
o
p
m
_
a
_
0
0
0
5
0
p
d
/
.
i
f
b
y
g
u
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
Altercentric Modulation in 14-Month-Old Infants
Kampis and Kovács
Perner, J., & Ruffman, T. (2005). Infants’ insight into the mind: How
deep? Science, 308(5719), 214–216. https://doi.org/10.1126
/science.1111656, PubMed: 15821079
Phillips, J., Buckwalter, W., Cushman, F., Friedman, O., Martin, A.,
Turri, J., Santos, L., & Knobe, J. (2021). Knowledge before belief.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 44, e140. https://doi.org/10.1017
/S0140525X20000618, PubMed: 32895070
Phillips, J., Ong, D. C., Surtees, A. D. R., Xin, Y., Williams, S., Saxe,
R., & Frank, M. C. (2015). A second look at automatic theory of
mind: Reconsidering Kovács, Téglás, and Endress (2010). Psycho-
logical Science, 26(9), 1353–1367. https://doi.org/10.1177
/0956797614558717, PubMed: 26253550
Piaget, J. (1926). The language and thought of the children. Turbner
and Co., Ltd.
Poulin-Dubois, D., Rakoczy, H., Burnside, K., Crivello, C.,
Dörrenberg, S., Edwards, K., Krist, H., Kulke, L., Liszkowski, U.,
Low, J., Perner, J., Powell, L., Priewasser, B., Rafetseder, E., &
Ruffman, T. (2018). Do infants understand false beliefs? We don’t
know yet—A commentary on Baillargeon, Buttelmann and
Southgate’s commentary. Cognitive Development, 48(November),
302–315. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogdev.2018.09.005
Rakoczy, H. (2012). Do infants have a theory of mind? The British
Journal of Developmental Psychology, 30(Pt 1), 59–74. https://doi
.org/10.1111/j.2044-835X.2011.02061.x, PubMed: 22429033
Rakoczy, H. (2017). In defense of a developmental dogma: Chil-
dren acquire propositional attitude folk psychology around age
4. Synthese, 194, 689–707. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015
-0860-8
Samson, D., Apperly, I. A., Braithwaite, J. J., Andrews, B. J., & Bodley
Scott, S. E. (2010). Seeing it their way: Evidence for rapid and
involuntary computation of what other people see. Journal of
Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance,
36(5), 1255–1266. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0018729, PubMed:
20731512
Schneider, D., Bayliss, A. P., Becker, S. I., & Dux, P. E. (2012). Eye
movements reveal sustained implicit processing of others’ men-
tal states. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 141(3),
433–438. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0025458, PubMed: 21910557
Schober, M. F. (1993). Spatial perspective-taking in conversation.
Cognition, 47(1), 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(93)
90060-9, PubMed: 8482069
Schuwerk, T., Kampis, D., Baillargeon, R., Biro, S., Bohn, M., Byers-
Heinlein, K., Dörrenberg, S., Fisher, C., Franchin, L., Fulcher, T.,
Garbisch, I., Geraci, A., Grosse Wiesmann, C. G., Hamlin, K.,
Haun, D. B. M., Hepach, R., Hunnius, S., Hyde, D. C., Karman,
P., … Rakoczy, H. (2021, February 14). Action anticipation based
on an agent’s epistemic state in toddlers and adults. PsyArXiv.
https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/x4jbm
Scott, R. M., & Baillargeon, R. (2009). Which penguin is this? Attrib-
uting false beliefs about object 18 months. Child Development,
80(4), 1172–1196. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2009
.01324.x, PubMed: 19630901
Seow, T., & Fleming, S. M. (2019). Perceptual sensitivity is modu-
lated by what others can see. Attention, Perception, and Psycho-
physics, 81(6), 1979–1990. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-019
-01724-5, PubMed: 31062300
Simpson, A.
J., & Todd, A. R.
Intergroup visual
perspective-taking: Shared group membership impairs
self-perspective inhibition but may facilitate perspective calcula-
tion. Cognition, 166, 371–381. https://doi.org/10.1016/j
.cognition.2017.06.003, PubMed: 28605699
(2017).
Southgate, V. (2020). Are infants altercentric? The Other and the Self
in early social cognition. Psychological Review, 127(4), 505–523.
https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000182, PubMed: 31868391
Southgate, V., & Vernetti, A. (2014). Belief-based action prediction
in preverbal infants. Cognition, 130(1), 1–10. https://doi.org/10
.1016/j.cognition.2013.08.008, PubMed: 24140991
Spengler, S., Brass, M., Kühn, S., & Schütz-Bosbach, S. (2010). Min-
imizing motor mimicry by myself: Self-focus enhances online
action-control mechanisms during motor contagion. Conscious-
ness and Cognition, 19(1), 98–106. https://doi.org/10.1016/j
.concog.2009.12.014, PubMed: 20116291
Stahl, A. E., & Feigenson, L. (2014). Social knowledge facilitates
chunking in infancy. Child Development, 85(4), 1477–1490.
https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12217, PubMed: 24433226
Stahl, A. E., & Feigenson, L. (2018). Infants use linguistic group dis-
tinctions to chunk items in memory. Journal of Experimental
Child Psychology, 172, 149–167. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp
.2018.03.005, PubMed: 29626755
Surtees, A., Apperly, I., & Samson, D. (2016). I’ve got your number:
Spontaneous perspective-taking in an interactive task. Cognition,
150, 43–52. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2016.01.014,
PubMed: 26848735
Thoermer, C., Sodian, B., Vuori, M., Perst, H., & Kristen, S.
(2012). Continuity from an implicit to an explicit understand-
ing of false belief from infancy to preschool age. The British
Journal of Developmental Psychology, 30(Pt 1), 172–187.
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-835X.2011.02067.x, PubMed:
22429040
Tomasello, M. (2018). How children come to understand false
beliefs: A shared intentionality account. Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences, 115(34), 8491–8498. https://doi
.org/10.1073/pnas.1804761115, PubMed: 30104372
Van de Walle, G. A., Carey, S., & Prevor, M. (2000). Bases for object
individuation in infancy: Evidence from manual search. Journal
of Cognition and Development, 1(3), 249–280. https://doi.org/10
.1207/S15327647JCD0103_1
Van Der Wel, R. P. R. D., Sebanz, N., & Knoblich, G. (2014). Do
people automatically track others’ beliefs? Evidence from a con-
tinuous measure. Cognition, 130(1), 128–133. https://doi.org/10
.1016/j.cognition.2013.10.004, PubMed: 24216021
Wilcox, T. (1999). Object individuation: Infants’ use of shape, size,
pattern, and color. Cognition, 72(2), 125–166. https://doi.org/10
.1016/S0010-0277(99)00035-9, PubMed: 10553669
OPEN MIND: Discoveries in Cognitive Science
207
l
D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d
f
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
i
r
e
c
t
.
m
i
t
.
/
e
d
u
o
p
m
i
/
l
a
r
t
i
c
e
-
p
d
f
/
d
o
i
/
i
.
/
/
1
0
1
1
6
2
o
p
m
_
a
_
0
0
0
5
0
2
0
3
6
0
6
7
o
p
m
_
a
_
0
0
0
5
0
p
d
.
/
i
f
b
y
g
u
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3