Abstract
Children learn about the world from the testimony of other people, often coming to accept what they are told about a variety of unobservable and indeed counter-intuitive phenomena. However, research on children’s learning from testimony has paid limited attention to the foundations of that capacity. We ask whether those foundations can be observed in infancy. We review evidence from two areas of research: infants’ sensitivity to the emotional expressions of other people; and their capacity to understand the exchange of information through non-verbal gestures and vocalization. We conclude that a grasp of the bi-directional exchange of information is present early in the second year. We discuss the implications for future research, especially across different cultural settings.
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Notes
Moses et al. (2001) actually tested infants with two different toys but only the bumble ball toy proved ambiguous. The other toy appeared to make most children apprehensive.
Infants’ sensitivity to informants’ trustworthiness goes beyond a preference for accurate emotional signalers. Zmyj et al. (2010) had 14-month-olds watch videos of people whose reliability was demonstrated by how they used common objects. Across three familiarization videos, infants watched either a reliable person who confidently performed typical actions (e.g., in one video, he placed a shoe on his foot and said “Ah!”) or an unreliable person who expressed uncertainty while performing unusual actions (e.g., in one video, he placed a shoe on his hand, and said “Hm.”). Infants then saw the person perform novel actions—turning on a lamp with his forehead (as in Poulin-Dubouis et al. 2011), and turning on a box filled with lights by sitting on it. Following each of these actions, the experimenter placed the objects (the lamp and box, respectively) in front of the infant and said, “Now you can play with it!” Infants who had watched the reliable person were more than twice as likely to imitate his novel actions compared to infants who watched the unreliable person.
There is an ambiguity in this study. The statement that, “The ball is in the cup” provides information to the child, reinforcing his or her prior observation of the transfer, as well as to the returning experimenter. Therefore, when children are surprised in the informative conditions, they may show surprise because they saw the toy moved to the cup, were then told that the toy was in the cup (making it a very strong representation), and yet, the experimenter searched somewhere else. A control condition is needed in which the statement is heard by the child but not by the returning experimenter. I am grateful to Patricia Ganea for calling my attention to this issue of interpretation.
Two recent studies with deaf infants provide some tantalizing, preliminary evidence on this issue. Meristo et al. (2012) report that hearing infants outperformed deaf infants (ranging from 17 to 26 months) born to hearing parents in their comprehension—as indexed by anticipatory looking—of where a cartoon character would search, given the character’s false belief. No group difference was observed when the character held a true belief. By contrast, Hobbs, Resendes, Pyers and Carey (2013) found no difference between deaf and hearing children’s performance on simple theory-of-mind tasks despite differences in the size of their vocabulary. Watch this space.
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Acknowledgments
Several people provided feedback on this paper or provided us with forthcoming papers. We warmly thank Katarina Begus, Kathleen Corriveau, Maria Fusaro, Vibeke Grøver, Kathryn Hobbs, Melissa Koenig, Jennie Pyers, Samuel Ronfard, Victoria Southgate, Athena Vouloumanos, Alex Was and Imac Zambrana.
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Harris, P.L., Lane, J.D. Infants Understand How Testimony Works. Topoi 33, 443–458 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-013-9180-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-013-9180-0