Early Theory of Mind development - Are infants inherently altercentric?

Human social interaction is characterized by the ability to reason about other individuals’ unobservable mental states, referred to as Theory of Mind. For decades, this ability was believed to develop around the age of 4 years, when children start passing the false belief task. In recent years, however, novel infant Theory of Mind tasks have shown that, already in their first two years of life, infants make correct predictions of how agents with a false belief are going to act. These findings have triggered a controversial debate on when Theory of Mind develops and whether infants already have a full-fledged Theory of Mind.Here, we suggest that infants might solve the novel infant Theory of Mind tasks due to an altercentric modulation of their own representation of the world, rather than by entertaining two divergent representations – the others’ and their own perspective. We propose an enhanced social encoding mechanism through which infants acquire a stronger representation of events experienced together with another person than events that are only witnessed by the child alone. This mechanism allows the infant to predict others’ actions in line with their representation of the world, but also predicts that infants produce reality errors where, in their own expectations about the world, they are influenced more by what the other believes to be the case than what infants themselves should know to be the case. While adaptive in infancy, when the child has limited abilities to act on the world and is highly dependent on others, we propose that this mechanism changes towards the end of the second year of life when children acquire an explicit concept of themselves. The presence of a self-concept highlights the child’s own perspective on the world and leads to the typical egocentric errors committed by 3-year-olds in the traditional false belief tasks. Only when maturing executive abilities allow the child to maintain two different representations simultaneously, and to meta-represent one of these, around the age of 4 years, do children become able to flexibly reason about others mental states on traditional false belief tasks.