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Interest contagion in violation-of-expectation-based false-belief tasks

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Author

Summary, in English

In the debate about how to interpret Violation-of-Expectation (VoE) based false-belief experiments, it has been suggested that infants are predicting the actions of the agent based on more or less sophisticated cognitive means. We present an alternative, more parsimonious interpretation, exploring the possibility that the infants’ reactions are not governed by rational expectation but rather of memory strength due to differences in the allocation of cognitive resources earlier in the experiment. Specifically, it is argued that 1) infants’ have a tendency to find more interest in events that observed agents are attending to as opposed to unattended events (‘interest contagion’), 2) the object-location configurations that result from such interesting events are remembered more strongly by the infants, and 3) the VoE contrast arises as a consequence of the difference in memory strength between more and less interesting object-location configurations. We discuss two published experiments, one which we argue that our model can explain (Kovács, Téglás & Endress 2010), and one which we argue cannot be readily explained by our model (Onishi & Baillargeon 2005).

Publishing year

2014

Language

English

Publication/Series

Frontiers in Psychology

Volume

5

Issue

23

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

Frontiers Media S. A.

Topic

  • Psychology

Keywords

  • interest contagion
  • false belief
  • theory of mind
  • memory
  • attention
  • development

Status

Published

Project

  • From interest contagion to perspective sharing - How social attention affects children's performance in false-belief tasks
  • Thinking in Time: Cognition, Communication and Learning

Research group

  • CogComlab

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 1664-1078