Montreal Psychologist and Therapist

After the reliability of the looker was established, the infants completed the True-Belief Task in which they observed an experimenter playing with a red cup in a puppet theatre stage and then hid the cup in one of two box locations located on opposite sides of the stage – a yellow box or green box. The infant then witnessed several trials of the “looker” searching for the red cup in the location where she hid it and then observed a ...

An important aspect of a child’s cognitive development is the emergence of a theory of mind, or the ability to understand that others can have beliefs, knowledge and desires that are different from one’s own. Previously, it was believed that children showed this ability around the age of 3 to 4 by using a verbal task to tap into their understanding of other people’s mental states. More recent studies have looked at infants’ understanding of theory of mind by using ...

When it came to the Gaze Following Task, researchers found that infants in the “reliable looker” condition followed the experimenter’s gaze to a target behind the barrier more often than infants in the “unreliable looker” condition. Both groups followed the experimenter’s gaze to the sticker that was visible on the front of the barrier equally as often. These findings suggest that when the unreliable looker was looking at a toy that was outside the infants’ view, they potentially used their ...

Previous research on infant gaze following has demonstrated the importance of gaze following in the development of social interaction skills, language skills, the understanding of emotional displays as well as the development an understanding of the beliefs, intentions and desires of others. In an attempt to discover whether 14-month-old infants understand that a “looker” is seeing something that the infant cannot (or the mental activity of understanding another person’s mind) or whether the infant is simply being oriented to a ...