13-Month-Olds’ Understanding of Social Interactions

Abstract

In the present research, we investigated how 13-month-olds use their emergent theory-of-mind understanding (i.e., understanding about other people's mental states, such as their intentions, perceptions, and beliefs) and social-evaluation skills to make sense of social interactions. The infants watched three puppets (A, B, and C) interact. The results showed that after seeing Agents A and B interact in a positive manner, infants expected them to continue doing so, even after they saw B hit another agent, C, while A was absent. When A was present to witness B's harmful action, however, infants expected A to change his or her behavior and ignore B. Therefore, infants seemed to consider A's perspectives when predicting A's actions. Furthermore, if B accidentally hit C when A was present, infants seemed to accept that A could interact or not interact with B, which suggests that they had taken into account B's intention in their interpretations of the agents' interactions.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 106 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.