Neural correlates of infant action processing relate to theory of mind in early childhood

Filippi, Courtney; Choi, Yeo Bi; Woodward, Amanda L.

doi:10.1111/desc.12876

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…Thus, potentially, an infant could identify the goal-state and goal-object that an actor is moving toward, without identifying the mental states that guide the actor (i.e., the actor wants the object). Our findings do not replicate previous research showing longitudinal links between behavioral and neural markers of action processing and explicit theory of mind (ToM) [ 17 , 20 , 22 , 24 , 25 , 48 – 51 ]. Thus, it remains unclear why a link emerges in some measures of action encoding and not others.…”

Section: Studycontrasting

confidence: 99%

Testing the stability of theory of mind: A longitudinal approach

et al. 2020

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An explicit understanding of false belief develops around the age of four years. However, tasks based on spontaneous responses have revealed an implicit understanding of belief and other theory of mind constructs in infants in their second year of life. The few longitudinal studies that have examined conceptual continuity of theory of mind from infancy to early childhood have reported mixed findings. Here we report two longitudinal experiments to investigate the developmental relation between implicit and explicit theory of mind. No link was observed in the first experiment between false belief and intention understanding measured at 14 and 18 months with the violation of expectation paradigm and tasks measuring explicit and implicit false belief at four or five years of age. In the second experiment, infants aged 18 months were tested with a battery of tasks that measured knowledge inference and false belief. They were then tested with the theory of mind scale at five years of age. The parents completed the Children’s Social Understanding Scale (CSUS) and the Social Communication Questionnaire (SCQ). As in the first experiment, there were no associations between early and later forms of theory of mind. We suggest that these findings do not support the view that there is conceptual continuity in theory of mind development.

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Section: Studycontrasting

confidence: 99%

Testing the stability of theory of mind: A longitudinal approach

et al. 2020

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“…It is possible that training gives rise to differential attention processing that highlights the relation between the agent and the goal, which cannot be accounted by overt attention alone. Neuroscientific methods (e.g., EEG, fNIRS, or fMRI) may provide more sensitive measures of attentional processing (Begus and Bonawitz, 2020;Filippi et al, 2020;Stapel, 2020;Ellis et al, 2021) and may inform whether active training generates changes in attentional processes which in turn modulates action understanding.…”

Section: Future Directionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Infant action understanding: the roles of active training and motor development

Chung,

Filippi,

Woodward

2024

Front. Dev. Psychol.

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IntroductionThis study examined the potential interplay between motor development and intervention in support of action understanding.MethodsEighty nine-month-old infants completed a tool-use training session and goal imitation paradigm that assessed action understanding in counterbalanced order. A metric of motor development was obtained using the Early Motor Questionnaire.ResultsResults indicated that training improved action understanding, particularly for those infants who started out with lower means-end skills. Results further indicated that infants who did not receive any training experience in the lab beforehand, drew on their existing means-end skills.DiscussionThese results emphasize independent contributions of training and motor development on action understanding and shed light on the interaction between training and individual motor readiness in facilitating action understanding in infancy.

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“…It enables children to make sense of the observed physical changes by categorizing the stream of events into meaningful units (Baldwin & Baird, 2001; Saylor et al., 2007). Not surprisingly, developmental researchers have investigated how young children process human actions (Filippi et al., 2020; Kosie & Baldwin, 2021; Maffongelli et al., 2018; Reid et al., 2009) and come to understand different characteristics of others’ behavior (Choisdealbha et al., 2016; Paulus et al., 2011; Wellman et al., 2008).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

What is in an action? Preschool children predict that agents take previous paths and not previous goals

Gönül,

Kammermeier,

Paulus

2023

Developmental Science

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Developmental science has experienced a vivid debate on whether young children prioritize goals over means in their prediction of others’ actions. Influential developmental theories highlight the role of goal objects for action understanding. Yet, recent infant studies report evidence for the opposite. The empirical evidence is therefore inconclusive. The current study advanced this debate by assessing preschool children's verbal predictions of others’ actions. In five experiments (N = 302), we investigated whether preschool children and adults predict agents to move towards their previous goal (that is, show goal‐related predictions) or predict agents to move along the same movement path that they pursued before. While Experiments 1a, 1b and 1c presented young children and adults with animated agents, Experiments 2a and 2b presented participants with human grasping action. An integrative analysis across experiments revealed that children were more likely to predict the agent to move along the same movement path, Z = ‐4.574, p ≤ 0.0001 (r = 0.304). That is, preschool children were more likely to predict that agents would move along the same trajectory even though this action would lead to a new goal object. Thus, our findings suggest that young children's action prediction relies on the detection of spatial and movement information. Overall, we discuss our findings in terms of theoretical frameworks that conceive of action understanding as an umbrella term that comprises different forms and facets in which humans understand others’ actions.Highlights We investigated whether preschool children predict agents to move towards their previous goal or to move along the same movement path that they pursued before. Unlike adults, preschool children predicted that agents would move along the same trajectory even though this action would lead to a new goal. Adults’ goal‐based predictions were affected from contextual details, whereas children systematically made path‐based predictions. Young children's action prediction relies on the detection of spatial and movement information.

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Neural correlates of infant action processing relate to theory of mind in early childhood

Cited by 4 publications

References 74 publications

Testing the stability of theory of mind: A longitudinal approach

Testing the stability of theory of mind: A longitudinal approach

Infant action understanding: the roles of active training and motor development

What is in an action? Preschool children predict that agents take previous paths and not previous goals

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