Making Sense of Others' Actions
Renée Baillargeon
Professor of Psychology, University of Illinois
“Making Sense of Others’ Actions:
Psychological Reasoning in Infancy”
Stewart Building, Room S1/3
Friday, April 9, 2010, 3:30 PM
1205 Dr. Penfield Ave (at Stanley)
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Beginning early in the first year of life, infants attempt to make sense ofĚýothers’ intentional actions. Although the nature and development of infants’Ěýpsychological reasoning (or “theory of mind”, as it is sometimes called)Ěýremain the subjects of intense controversy, the notion that infants alreadyĚýpossess some understanding of others’Ěýactions is becoming widely accepted. In much of the research on this topic,Ěýinfants watch simple scenes in which a person acts on objects (e.g., aĚýperson reaches consistently for chocolates as opposed to carrots).
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Investigators examine what mental states infants attribute to the person,Ěýand how they use these mental states to interpret and predict the person’sĚýactions. Results indicate that infants in the first year of life are able toĚýattribute at least two kinds of mental states to a person: motivationalĚýstates (e.g., goals, dispositions), which specify the person’s motivation inĚýthe scene, and reality-congruent informational states (e.g., the person'sĚýknowledge or ignorance), which specify what accurate information the personĚýpossesses or lacks about the scene.
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Over the past few years, experiments onĚýreality-incongruent
informational states have focused on the question ofĚýwhether
infants also realize that a person can hold false or pretend
beliefs
about a scene. In my talk, I will review evidence that, when
attempting toĚýmake sense of a person’s actions in a simple
scene, infants take intoĚýaccount not only the motivational and
reality-congruent informational butĚýalso the
reality-incongruent informational Ěýstates of the person.
