Teleological reasoning in 4-month-old infants: Pupil dilations and contextual constraints

Abstract

Four-month-old infants were presented with feeding actions performed in a rational or irrational manner. Infants reacted to the irrational feeding actions by dilating their pupils, but only in the presence of rich contextual constraints. The study demonstrates that teleological processes are online at 4 months of age and illustrates the usefulness of pupil dilations as a measure of social cognitive processes early in infancy. © 2011 Gredebäck, Melinder. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.