13:30 - 15:00
Wed-P3-Poster III-1
Wed-Poster III-1
Room: P3
Do infants anticipate others’ belief-related actions by biased object memory?
Wed-P3-Poster III-106
Presented by: Anna-Lena Tebbe
Anna-Lena Tebbe 1, Katrin Rothmaler 1, Robert Hepach 2, Charlotte Grosse Wiesmann 1
1 Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany, 2 Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, United Kingdom
In previous studies, infants younger than 2 years have demonstrated correct expectations of how an agent with a false belief will act. However, the robustness of these findings and the underlying mechanism remain a matter of debate. The altercentric account proposes that infants’’ own representation of the world may be biased by the view of others. Specifically, infants might misremember objects based on where others saw them, allowing them to predict where the other will search for the object later on. Here, we tested whether infants' object representation and memory is spontaneously modulated by an agent's belief. In a preregistered eye-tracking study, we presented infants, aged 8-10 and 17-19 months, with videos, in which an agent observes an object moving into one of two locations. Subsequently, the agent then either observes (True Belief) or misses (False Belief) the object's change of location from location A to B. We predict that infants' expectation of the objects' location is altercentrically modulated, i.e., that infants expect the object where the agent believes the object to be. We test whether infants who correctly anticipate the agent’s action in the false belief condition also expect the object in the believed rather than the real object location. We have currently tested N=77 children and results are expected by January 2023.
Keywords: Theory of Mind, anticipatory looking, pupillometry, eye tracking, altercentric cognition, object representation