Abstract
For human infants, agents—defined as other humans—are the fundamental units of their social world. Agents provide very special stimuli to infants. Researchers of object–person differentiation have proposed a set of rules that infants probably use during their interaction with people as opposed to objects.
This chapter reviews investigations into how children understand and detect both human and nonhuman agents and communicate with them, starting with a definition of mentalizing and summary of the course of its development. A study is presented on infant imitation of a robot’s action and a false-belief task with robots, proposing a new research domain called “developmental cybernetics,” which studies the interaction between children and robots (Itakura et al., Infancy 13:519–532, 2008). It has been predicted that in ordinary twenty-first-century households, robotics technology will be as common as refrigerators and dishwashers (Asada and Kuniyoshi, Robot intelligence, Iwanami Shoten, Tokyo, 2006). Therefore, exploring developmental cybernetics is important. Finally, two more studies from the perspective of cognitive neuroscience are presented, with a discussion on the usefulness of the neurocognitive approach in understanding the development of mentalizing, alongside two studies concerned with this issue.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Asada M, Kuniyoshi Y (2006) Robot intelligence, vol 4. Iwanami Shoten, Tokyo
Baldwin DA, Baird JA, Saylor MM, Clark MA (2001) Infants parse dynamic action. Child Dev 72:708–717
Baron-Cohen S (1995) Mindblindness: an essay on autism and theory of mind. MIT Press, Cambridge
Barr R, Hayne H (2000) Age-related changes in imitation: implications for memory development. In: Rovee-Collier C, Lipsitt LP, Hayne H (eds) Progress in infancy research. Lawrence Erlbaum, Hillsdale, pp 21–67
Behne T, Carpenter M, Call J, Tomasello M (2005) Unwilling versus unable: infants’ understanding of intentional action. Dev Psychol 41:328–337
Bellagamba F, Tomasello M (1999) Re-enacting intended acts: comparing 12- and 18-month-olds. Infant Behav Dev 22:277–282
Bertenthal BI, Profitt DR, Cutting JE (1984) Infant sensitivity to figural coherence in biomechanical motions. J Exp Child Psychol 37:213–230
Brooks R, Meltzoff AN (2002) The importance of eyes: how infants interpret adult looking behavior. Dev Psychol 38:958–966
Carpenter M, Nagell K, Tomasello M (1998) Social cognition, joint attention, and communicative competence from 9 to 15 months of age. Monogr Soc Res Child Dev 63(4):i–vi, 1–143
Crichton M, Lange-Kuettner C (1999) Animacy and proposition in infancy: tracking, waving and reaching to self-propelled and induced moving objects. Dev Sci 2:318–324
Farroni T, Massaccesi S, Pividori D, Johnson MH (2004) Gaze following in newborns. Infancy 5:39–60
Frith U, Frith CD (2003) Development and neurophysiology of mentalizing. In: Frith C, Walpert D (eds) Neuroscience of social cognition. Oxford University Press, New York
Gergely G, Csibra G (2004) The social construction of the cultural mind: imitative learning as a mechanism of human pedagogy. Interact Stud Soc Behav Commun Biol Artif Syst 6:463–481 (Special Issue: Making minds II)
Gergely G, Nadasdy Z, Csibra G, Biro S (1995) Taking the intentional stance at 12 months of age. Cognition 56:65–193
Gomez JC (2004) Apes, monkeys, children, and the growth of mind. Harvard University Press, Cambridge
Graham SA, Nilsen ES, Nayer SL (2007) Following the intentional eye: the role of gaze cues in early word learning. In: Flom R, Lee K, Muir D (eds) Ontogeny of gaze processing. Lawrence Erlbaum, Mahwah
Hoehl S, Reid V, Mooney J, Striano T (2007) What are you looking at? Infants’ neural processing of an adult’s object-directed eye gaze. Dev Sci 10:1–7
Itakura S (2006) To what extent do infants and children find a mind in non-human agents? In: Fujita K, Itakura S (eds) Diversity of cognition. Kyoto University Press, Kyoto
Itakura S, Ishida H, Kanda T, Ishiguro H, Lee K (2008) How to build an intentional android: infants’ imitation of a robot’s goal-directed actions. Infancy 13:519–532
Johnson SC (2003) Detecting agents. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 358:549–559
Johnson MH (2005) Developmental cognitive neuroscience. Blackwell, Oxford
Johnson MH, Morton J (1991) Biology and cognitive development: the case of face recognition. Blackwell, Oxford
Johnson SC, Slaughter V, Carey S (1998) Whose gaze will infants follow? Features that elicit gaze-following in 12-month-olds. Dev Sci 1:233–238
Johnson SC, Booth A, O’Hearn K (2001) Inferring the goals of nonhuman agent. Cognit Dev 16:637–656
Kanda T, Hirano T, Eaton D, Ishiguro H (2004) Interactive robots as social partners and peer tutors for children: a field trial. Hum Comput Interact 19:61–84
Legerstee MA (1992) Review of the animate/inanimate distinction in infancy. Early Dev Parent 1:59–67
Leslie AM (1987) Pretence and representation: the origins of ‘theory of mind’. Psychol Rev 94:412–426
Luo Y, Baillargeon R (2005) Can a self-propelled box have a goal? Psychological reasoning in 5-month-old infants. Psychol Sci 16:601–608
Meltzoff AN (1995) Understanding the intentions of others: re-enactment of intended acts. Dev Psychol 31:838–850
Meltzoff AN (1999) Origins of theory of mind, cognition and communication. J Commun Disord 32:251–269
Meltzoff AN (2005) Imitation and other minds: the “Like Me” hypothesis. In: Hurley S, Cater N (eds) Perspectives on imitation: from neuroscience to social science. MIT Press, Cambridge, pp 55–77
Moriguchi Y, Kanda T, Ishiguro H, Shimada Y, Itakura S (2011) Can young children learn words from a robot? Interact Stud 12:107–118
Morita T, Itakura S, Saito ND, Nakashita S, Harada T, Kochiyama T et al (2008) The role of the right prefrontal cortex in self-evaluation of the face: a functional magnetic resonance imaging study. J Cogn Neurosci 20:342–355
Phillips AT, Wellman HM (2005) Infants’ understanding of object-directed action. Cognition 98:137–155
Premack D (1990) The infant’s theory of mind. Cognition 36:1–16
Premack D, Woodruff G (1978) Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind? Behav Brain Sci 1:515–526
Quinn PC, Slater A (2003) Face perception at birth and beyond. In: Pascalis O, Slater A (eds) The development of face processing in infancy and early childhood: current perspectives. Nova Science, Hauppauge, pp 3–11
Reid VM, Striano T (2005) Adult gaze influences infant attention and object processing: implications for cognitive neuroscience. Eur J Neurosci 21:1763–1766
Shimizu YA, Johnson SC (2004) Infants’ attribution of a goal to a morphologically unfamiliar agent. Dev Sci 7:425–430
Spelke ES, Phillips A, Woodward A (1995) Infants’ knowledge of object motion and human action. In: Sperber D, Premack D, Premack AJ (eds) Causal cognition: a multidisciplinary debate. Symposia of the Fyssen Foundation. Oxford University Press, New York, pp 44–78
Wimmer H, Perner J (1983) Beliefs about beliefs-representation and constraining function of wrong beliefs in young children’s understanding of deception. Cognition 13:103–128
Woodward AL (1998) Infants selectively encode the goal object of an actor’s reach. Cognition 69:1–34
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2012 Springer Japan
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Itakura, S., Moriguchi, Y., Morita, T. (2012). The Development of Mentalizing and Emotion in Human Children. In: Watanabe, S., Kuczaj, S. (eds) Emotions of Animals and Humans. The Science of the Mind. Springer, Tokyo. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-54123-3_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-54123-3_9
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Tokyo
Print ISBN: 978-4-431-54122-6
Online ISBN: 978-4-431-54123-3
eBook Packages: Behavioral ScienceBehavioral Science and Psychology (R0)