The Development of Mentalizing and Emotion in Human Children

Abstract

(from the chapter) For human infants, agents-defined as other humans-are the fundamental units of their social world. Agents provide very special stimuli to infants. Researchers of object-person differentiation have proposed a set of rules that infants probably use during their interaction with people as opposed to objects. This chapter reviews investigations into how children understand and detect both human and nonhuman agents and communicate with them, starting with a definition of mentalizing and summary of the course of its development. A study is presented on infant imitation of a robot's action and a false-belief task with robots, proposing a new research domain called "developmental cybernetics," which studies the interaction between children and robots. It has been predicted that in ordinary twenty-first-century households, robotics technology will be as common as refrigerators and dishwashers. Therefore, exploring developmental cybernetics is important. Finally, two more studies from the perspective of cognitive neuroscience are presented, with a discussion on the usefulness of the neurocognitive approach in understanding the development of mentalizing, alongside two studies concerned with this issue. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved).