Exposure to behavioral regularities in everyday life predicts infants’ acquisition of mental state vocabulary

Abstract

There are two broad views of children's theory of mind. The mentalist view is that it emerges in infancy and is possibly innate. The minimalist view is that it emerges more gradually in childhood and is heavily dependent on learning. According to minimalism, children initially understand behaviors rather than mental states, and they are assisted in doing so by recognizing repeating patterns in behavior. The regularities in behavior allow them to predict future behaviors, succeed on theory-of-mind tasks, acquire mental state words, and eventually, understand the mental states underlying behavior. The present study provided the first clear evidence for the plausibility of this view by fitting head cameras to 54 infants aged 6 to 25 months, and recording their view of the world in their daily lives. At 6 and 12 months, infants viewed an average of 146.5 repeated behaviors per hour, a rate consistent with approximately 560,000 repetitions in their first year, and with repetitions correlating with children's acquisition of mental state words, even after controlling for their general vocabulary and a range of variables indexing social interaction. We also recorded infants' view of people searching or searching for and retrieving objects. These were 92 times less common and did not correlate with mental state vocabulary. Overall, the findings indicate that repeated behaviors provide a rich source of information for children that would readily allow them to recognize patterns in behavior and help them acquire mental state words, providing the first clear evidence for this claim of minimalism. K E Y W O R D S mentalism, minimalism, theory of mind Research Highlights• Six-to 25-month-olds wore head cameras to record home life from infants' point-ofview and help adjudicate between nativist and minimalist views of theory-of-mind (ToM).

Consistency and variability in multimodal parent–child social interaction: An at-home study using head-mounted eye trackers.

“…There is a growing trend of collecting long-form recordings of infants’ and toddlers’ daily lives using audio devices (e.g., Bergelson et al, 2019; Rosemberg et al, 2020; Soderstrom & Wittebolle, 2013), third-person cameras (carried by an experimenter that follows the infant around, e.g., Tamis-LeMonda et al, 2019), and wearable cameras, such as head-mounted cameras and bodycams worn by the child (e.g., Casillas et al, 2020; Clerkin et al, 2017; Fausey et al, 2016; Long et al, 2021; Ruffman et al, 2022; Sullivan et al, 2021). This line of research work has begun to quantify the visual and social experiences of infants and toddlers in the first few years of life.…”

Belief it or not: How children construct a theory of mind

“…Given infants' innate statistical learning ability, they should be able to detect regularities in the environment if regularities exist. My colleagues and I examined infants' exposure to regularities by placing a head camera on 6‐ to 25‐month‐old boys and girls of mainly European ethnicity from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds in New Zealand to film their home environments (Ruffman et al, 2022). We obtained a mean of 1 h and 45 min of video per child, which was subsequently coded for repeated behaviors (e.g., drinking from a cup repeatedly, folding laundry repeatedly).…”