CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2019
| Author | Kampis, Dóra |
|---|---|
| Title | Mindreaders in the crib: cognitive mechanisms for representing others' mental states in human infants |
| Summary | A crucial part of human cognition is to understand that people are guided not just by external factors, but also by their mental states. This capacity, termed “Theory of Mind”, has been of great interest in the past four decades to researchers form a variety of fields. A pressing question is how the ability to form metarepresentations of others’ mental states develops, and whether it is present in human infants. The present thesis investigated the cognitive mechanisms that may enable young infants to represent other people’s mental representations. The first two experiments explored the neuro-cognitive bases of infants’ ability to encode the world from another person’s perspective, hypothesizing that the cognitive systems involved in representing the world from infants’ own perspective are also recruited for encoding others’ beliefs. Indeed, there was a common neural activation when infants sustained an object representation, and when they could attribute such representations to someone else. Three subsequent studies investigated infants’ abilities to ascribe to others beliefs based on correct or mistaken individuation of objects using spatiotemporal or feature/kind information; and found that infants can represent others’ beliefs involving multiple objects, and object identity. Finally, the last two experiments probed the flexibility of infants’ mental state attributions by testing how infants can integrate new information into their already existing representations. Together, these studies point to the possibility of an early developing, flexible, and powerful apparatus suitable to handle multiple concurrent representations; which may be the core of a mature mindreading ability in adulthood. |
| Supervisor | Ágnes M. Kovács, Gergely Csibra |
| Department | Cognitive Science PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2019/kampis_dora.pdf |
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