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.
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