Concurrent Relations Between Perspective-Taking Skills, Desire Understanding, and Internal-State Vocabulary

Are Infants’ Theory-of-Mind Abilities Well Integrated? Implicit Understanding of Intentions, Desires, and Beliefs

“…It is important to highlight, however, that no other significant correlations were observed. The fact that infants' looking times at the scenes were largely unrelated across tasks is consistent with previous research on ToM development in toddlers or young children using interactive tasks (Carlson, Mandell, et al, 2004;Chiarella et al, 2013;Hughes & Ensor, 2005). Taken together, these results suggest that ToM concepts may develop independently in infancy and may only integrate during the preschool years.…”

“…Chiarella, Kristen, PoulinDubois, and Sodian (2013) reported no significant correlations among scores on ToM tasks in 30-to 38-month-old toddlers. More specifically, children completed two or three ToM tasks, including a visual perspective-taking task, a desire-understanding task, and an emotional perspective-taking task, and results revealed no significant correlations in either the Canadian or German sample.…”

References to Mental States in Mother–Child Conversation in the Second Year of Life

“…Likewise the findings referring to child mental (Bellagamba et al 2014;Bretherton and Beeghly 1982;Chiarella et al 2012;Poulin-Dubois et al 2009). Physiological and perceptual terms tend to be the most representative categories used by children, followed by emotional and volitional terms.…”

Goal attributions and instrumental helping at 14 and 24 months of age

“…Experiments by Hamlin et al (2007Hamlin et al ( , 2010Hamlin et al ( , 2013, Luo (2011), Luo andBaillargeon (2005, 2007), Luo and Beck (2010), and Luo and Johnson (2009) have been interpreted as showing that infants attribute enduring desires to agents, but the evidence for desire understanding in these experiments is indirect, and alternative interpretations of their findings have been offered (Hernik & Southgate, 2012). Studies using active measures of desire understanding have found continued development in this domain during the second year (Chiarella et al, 2013;Wright & Poulin-Dubois, 2012). In the present studies, toddlers appear clearly to discern the desire of an agent who is actively attending to, and attempting to reach, an object (Experiment 5).…”

“…In contrast, 14-month-old toddlers gave the actor the food item that they themselves preferred. In http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2015.03.014 0010-0277/Ó 2015 Published by Elsevier B.V. subsequent research, even the older toddlers' ability to ignore their own preference and give the appropriate object was found to be fragile (Chiarella, Kristen, Poulin-Dubois & Sodian, 2013;Wright & Poulin-Dubois, 2012). Although somewhat younger children can use expressions of desire or aversion to gain information about objects (Klinnert, Emde, Butterfield, & Campos, 1986), their ability to reason about the desires of others may be hampered by the challenging task of linking expressions of emotion to internal states or to goal-directed actions (Hepach & Westermann, 2013;Skerry & Spelke, 2014;Vaish & Woodward, 2010).…”