A new study shows that babies as young as 19 months can guess what other people are thinking! Scientists previously believed that the ability understand what others think developed at a later age.
Researchers from UCLA studied a group of around 90 children from three different communities, in rural China, the Fiji islands, and Ecuador. The youths ranged in age from 19 months to about 5 years.
As humans grow, we get better at gauging other people’s mental states of mind. In the case of this study, the children had to determine a person’s knowledge about a specific issue.
The classic test used to determine a child’s understanding of another person’s knowledge about a specific subject is called the “false-belief task.” It involves one person coming into a room and placing an object in a hiding place. A second person then comes in and puts that same object into their pocket, without the first individual knowing about it. When the first person returns, the experimenter asks the child where the child thinks the first person will look for the object.
The task entails that a child have a “theory of mind,” meaning the ability to understand another person’s perspective. By ages 4 to 7, most children in Western countries are able to answer that the first person will look in the original place where the object had been hidden, because the person doesn’t know that the object was moved. However, children from different regions of the planet give that answer at different ages.
Previous observations had shown that if researchers don’t ask babies where they think the first person will look for the object, but instead follow the youngsters’ eye movements, the babies appear to understand the concept much earlier than previously thought.
To test the matter, study author H. Clark Barrett, an anthropologist at UCLA, and his colleagues, created a live-action play with similar components as the false-belief test: a man hides a pair of scissors inside a box, then another person comes in the room, takes the scissors and places them in his pocket. As the second person puts scissors in his pocket, he pauses, looks at the ceiling, and says: “Hmm … I wonder where they’ll look for the scissors.” The researchers then videotaped the children’s reactions to what the children had just witnessed.
The children consistently looked at the box where the scissors had been originally placed, showing that they expected the first man to look for the scissors where he had left them.
The study showed that children possess this “mind-reading ability” years earlier than previously thought, and that this ability is consistent across different cultures.
The findings appear to indicate that the children’s ability to put themselves in another person’s shoes is universal, and that cultural differences may have accounted for the differing responses from children in different age groups previously observed. For instance, in some cultures, parents may not often ask their children rhetorical or playful questions, and the babies in those cultures may not have answered the question because the babies thought to themselves that the adult asking the question should have known the answer.
The results of the study were published in the British journal Proceedings of the Royal Society: B in January, 2013.
By Lisa Pecos