The Role of Declarative Pointing in Developing a Theory of Mind

Abstract

It has been suggested that the child's capacity to represent and influence another person's attentional state about an object or event in triadic interactions (declarative communication) is an early manifestation of social understanding in the second year of life. This study tested the following predictions: First, in typically developing children declarative pointing emerges later than imperative pointing. Second, the capacity to use declarative pointing is linked to the understanding of other's intentions (i.e., to the capacity to reproduce other's intended acts after seeing failed attempts to perform these acts). The study was conducted in 2 phases. In the first phase, the parents of 133 typically developing infants completed the Questionnaire on Pointing Gesture, which allowed the identification of babies able to use pointing in familiar contexts. Of these children, 40 participated in the experiment and were tested on 2 tasks: a new task designed to elicit production and comprehension of imperative and declarative pointing, and a modified version of Meltzoff's (1995) task designed to assess understanding of others' intentions. Tasks were administered to each participant in 2 sessions carried out at 3‐month intervals. Children were 12 months old on average at the 1st session and 15 months old on average at the 2nd session. Results showed that children produced and understood declarative pointing later than imperative pointing. Furthermore, production of declarative pointing was clearly linked to understanding of others' intentions. No relation was found between production and comprehension of imperative pointing and intention understanding. Implications from the association between declarative pointing and inferring other's intentions are discussed.

In Infants' Hands: Identification of Preverbal Infants at Risk for Primary Language Delay

“…However, several experiments have established the distinct motives of pointing in these settings: When the imperative motive of infants' pointing is not satisfied and they do not obtain the object or help they want, infants insist in pointing (Camaioni et al, 2004). When their declarative motive is not satisfied because the experimenter does not look at what they point infants insist in pointing, and when an experimenter does not share their interest they cease pointing (Liszkowski et al, 2007).…”

“…For the experiments, we adapted two established settings used in previous studies that have proven to specifically elicit gestures with either an imperative or declarative motive (Camaioni, Perucchini, Bellagamba, & Colonnesi, 2004;Liszkowski, Carpenter, & Tomasello, 2007): In the declarative pointing condition, the experimenter sat at a table in front of a white cloth screen (2.30 9 2.50 m). It had four windows through which a hidden assistant could present one of four animal hand puppets.…”

Hand preference for pointing gestures and bimanual manipulation around the vocabulary spurt period

“…Camaioni et al (2004) observed that children were able to use imperative pointing earlier than declarative pointing; however, the opposite temporal shift has also been reported (Carpenter, Nagell, & Tomasello, 1998). This discrepancy between studies might be explained by methodological differences because the production of pointing under experimental conditions (Camaioni et al, 2004) may differ from the production of pointing in joint attention episodes between mother and child observed in play situations (Carpenter et al, 1998).…”

The origin of human multi-modal communication

“…Declarative pointing, on the other hand, whose sole function is to draw the other's attention to something, is human-specific in both form and function-it typically involves the index finger extended and has an abstract symbolic function: the recipient is meant not to look at the finger, but in the vector indicated beyond the finger, and find some referent that is probably what the pointer had in mind as worthy of attention. It would therefore appear to be tightly linked to social cognitive development [70], including Theory of Mind [71], and for that reason has been heralded as an ontogenetic milestone on the way to language (and, indeed, occurs in the majority of cases with vocalizations [72]). Pointing is thus an extremely powerful device, not because it accurately denotes (as Wittgenstein ([73], paragraph 33) noted, a point at, say, pieces of paper could be indicating the colour, the shape or even the number) but because it invites the recipient to locate a referent of mutual interest (a social process that recruits reward-related neurocircuitry in humans [74]).…”