On potential ocular artefacts in infant electroencephalogram: a reply to comments by Koster. Proc. R. Soc. B. 2016;(282: 20151683).
Nonverbal components of Theory of Mind in typical andatypical development. Infant Behavior and Development. 2016;(in press). Abstract
Nonverbal components of Theory of Mind in typical andatypical development
To successfully navigate the human social world one needs to realize that behavior is guidedby mental states such as goals and beliefs. Humans are highly proficient in using mentalstates to explain and predict their conspecific’s behavior, which enables adjusting one’sown behavior in online social interactions. Whereas according to recent studies even younginfants seem to integrate others’ beliefs into their own behavior, it is unclear what processescontribute to such competencies and how they may develop. Here we analyze a set of pos-sible nonverbal components of theory of mind that may be involved in taking into accountothers’ mental states, and discuss findings from typical and atypical development. To trackan agent’s belief one needs to (i) pay attention to agents that might be potential beliefholders, and identify their focus of attention and their potential belief contents; (ii) keeptrack of their different experiences and their consequent beliefs, and (iii) to make behav-ioral predictions based on such beliefs. If an individual fails to predict an agent’s behaviordepending on the agent’s beliefs, this may be due to a problem at any stage in the aboveprocesses. An analysis of the possible nonverbal processes contributing to belief trackingand their functioning in typical and atypical development aims to provide new insights intothe possible mechanisms that make human social interactions uniquely rich.
Neural signatures for sustaining object representations attributed to others in preverbal human infants. Proceedings of the Royal Society, London B. 2015;282:1683. Abstract
Neural signatures for sustaining object representations attributed to others in preverbal human infants
A major feat of social beings is to encode what their conspecifics see, know or believe. While various nonhuman animals show precursors of these abilities, humans perform uniquely sophisticated inferences about other people’s mental states. However, it is still unclear how these possibly human-specific capacities develop and whether preverbal infants, similarly to adults form representations of other agents’ mental states, specifically metarepresentations. We explored the neuro-cognitive bases of 8-month-olds’ ability to encode the world from another person’s perspective, using gamma-band EEG activity over the temporal lobes, an established neural signature for sustained object representation after occlusion. We observed such gamma-band activity when an object was occluded from the infants’ perspective, as well as when it was occluded only from the other person (Study 1), and also when subsequently the object disappeared but the person falsely believed the object to be present (Study 2). These findings suggest that the cognitive systems involved in representing the world from infants’ own perspective are also recruited for encoding others’ beliefs. Such results point to an early developing, powerful apparatus suitable to deal with multiple concurrent representations; and suggest that infants can have a metarepresentational understanding of other minds even before the onset of language.
Neural signatures for sustaining object representations attributed to others in preverbal human infants. Proc. R. Soc. B. 2015;(282: 20151683). Abstract
Neural signatures for sustaining object representations attributed to others in preverbal human infants
A major feat of social beings is to encode what their conspecifics see, know or believe. While various non-human animals show precursors of these abilities, humans perform uniquely sophisticated inferences about other people’s mental states. However, it is still unclear how these possibly human-specific capacities develop and whether preverbal infants, similarly to adults, form representations of other agents’ mental states, specifically metarepresentations.We explored the neurocognitive bases of eight-month-olds’ ability to encode the world from another person’s perspective, using gamma-band electroencephalographic activity over the temporal lobes, an established neural signature for sustained object representation after occlusion. We observed such gammaband activity when an object was occluded from the infants’ perspective, as well as when it was occluded only from the other person (study 1), and also when subsequently the object disappeared, but the person falsely believed the object to be present (study 2). These findings suggest that the cognitive systems involved in representing theworld from infants’ own perspective are also recruited for encoding others’ beliefs. Such results point to an early-developing, powerful apparatus suitable to deal with multiple concurrent representations, and suggest that infants can have a metarepresentational understanding of other minds even before the onset of language.