How fresh a look? A reply to Heyes

How Fresh a Look? A reply to Heyes Rose M. Scott, University of California Merced Renee Baillargeon, University of Illinois Heyes (in press) argues that all of the findings of infant false-belief understanding that have been published to date can be explained in terms of perceptual novelty and other low-level domain-general processes. We object to Heyes’s account on three grounds, as explained below. False-belief understanding before age 4 Until recently, it was generally assumed that children younger than about age 4 do not understand that agents can hold false beliefs. This assumption was based mainly on results from elicited-response tasks, which require answering a direct question about the likely behavior of an agent who holds a false belief. Onishi and Baillargeon (2005) cast doubt on this assumption when they published results from a novel non-elicited-response task showing that 15-month-olds can attribute false beliefs to others. To date, over 25 reports (see Table 1) have provided converging results with children ages 7 months to 4 years, using a wide range of verbal and non- verbal non-elicited-response tasks (including violation-of-expectation, anticipatory-looking, preferential-looking, anticipatory-pointing, and prompted-action tasks). Moreover, researchers have begun to develop and test processing models explaining why elicited-response tasks pose such difficulties for young children. We submit that it is this large and highly consistent body of work, and not just the “data from these infant false belief studies”, as Heyes (in press) believes, that is “establishing a new consensus in developmental science” (p. 3). Psychological reasoning in infancy Heyes (in press) argues that the existing experiments on infant false-belief understanding “fall short of demonstrating that infants have even an implicit theory of mind” (p. 2), and that infants may represent the events in these experiments “as colours, shapes, and movements, rather than as actions on objects by agents” (p. 6). These arguments ignore the fact that the experiments on infant false-belief understanding did not take place in a vacuum: The research on early psychological reasoning over the past 20 years makes clear that infants represent simple psychological events as “actions on objects by agents”, rather than as “colours, shapes, and movements” (for a comprehensive review, see Baillargeon et al., in press). It is true that researchers disagree about the specific nature and origins of infants’ psychological-reasoning abilities; but they generally agree that infants’ responses to agents’ actions are not merely driven by perceptual novelty, because there is overwhelming evidence to the contrary. As an example, consider Woodward’s (1998) seminal preference task and the myriad of findings that it has generated. In a typical task, infants first receive familiarization trials in which agent-1 repeatedly reaches for object-A as opposed to object-B. Next, infants receive a display trial in which agent-1 is absent and infants can observe that the locations of object-A and object- B have been switched. Finally, in the test trials, the agent returns and reaches for either object-A or object-B. Based on the consistent choice information provided in the familiarization trials, infants typically attribute to agent-1 a preference for object-A, they expect agent-1 to continue acting on this preference in the test trials, and they therefore detect a violation when agent-1 reaches for object-B instead. However, infants do not show this expectation: (1) if they are uncertain whether agent-1 is really an agent (e.g., Luo & Baillargeon, 2005; Shimizu & Johnson, 2004; Woodward, 1998); (2) if object-B is absent during the familiarization trials or is present but hidden from agent-1, so that agent-1’s repeated actions on object-A no longer provide choice information (e.g., Biro, Verschoor, & Coenen, 2011; Luo & Baillargeon, 2005, 2007; Luo &