Discovering mind: Development of mentalizing in human children

Abstract

For human infants, agents-other humans-are the fundamental units of their social world. Agents are very special stimuli to infants. Researchers of objectperson differentiation have proposed a set of rules that infants may use during their interaction with people as opposed to objects. For example, (1990) suggested that infants may perceive people as perceptual events that are both self-propelled and goal-directed objects. In such case, adults also perceive people as agents with intention. (1995, p. 60) described an infant's concept of human as follows: Three aspects of human interactions that are accessible in principle to young infants are contingency (humans react to one another), reciprocity (humans respond in kind to one to anther's actions), and communication (humans supply one another with information). Spelke et al. showed that infants may interpreter an object's movement with these three principles and the principle of contact. To explain the contact principle, they used the habituation procedure and showed that infants tended to assume that an object, if it moves, should have been set in motion by the push from another object (or person). On the other hand, there is no need to apply an external force for a social agent to move. They demonstrated that this kind of perception of agency has appeared in 7-month-olds. Agents are not simply physical objects with new properties added to them. On the contrary, they are entities of an animacy that can move on their own, breath, eat, drink, look, and engage in actions with objects or interact with other agents (Gomez 2004). © 2008 Springer Japan.