TY - JOUR

T1 - Neural signatures for sustaining object representations attributed to others in preverbal human infants

AU - Kampis, Dora

AU - Parise, Eugenio

AU - Csibra, Gergely

AU - Kovacs, Agnes Melinda

PY - 2015/11/22

Y1 - 2015/11/22

N2 - A major feat of social beings is to encode what their conspecifics see, know or believe. While various non-human animals show precursors of these abilities, humans perform uniquely sophisticated inferences about other people's mental states. However, it is still unclear how these possibly human-specific capacities develop and whether preverbal infants, similarly to adults, form representations of other agents' mental states, specifically metarepresentations. We explored the neurocognitive bases of eight-month-olds' ability to encode the world from another person's perspective, using gamma-band electroencephalographic activity over the temporal lobes, an established neural signature for sustained object representation after occlusion. We observed such gamma-band activity when an object was occluded from the infants' perspective, as well as when it was occluded only from the other person (study 1), and also when subsequently the object disappeared, but the person falsely believed the object to be present (study 2). These findings suggest that the cognitive systems involved in representing the world from infants' own perspective are also recruited for encoding others' beliefs. Such results point to an early-developing, powerful apparatus suitable to deal with multiple concurrent representations, and suggest that infants can have a metarepresentational understanding of other minds even before the onset of language.

AB - A major feat of social beings is to encode what their conspecifics see, know or believe. While various non-human animals show precursors of these abilities, humans perform uniquely sophisticated inferences about other people's mental states. However, it is still unclear how these possibly human-specific capacities develop and whether preverbal infants, similarly to adults, form representations of other agents' mental states, specifically metarepresentations. We explored the neurocognitive bases of eight-month-olds' ability to encode the world from another person's perspective, using gamma-band electroencephalographic activity over the temporal lobes, an established neural signature for sustained object representation after occlusion. We observed such gamma-band activity when an object was occluded from the infants' perspective, as well as when it was occluded only from the other person (study 1), and also when subsequently the object disappeared, but the person falsely believed the object to be present (study 2). These findings suggest that the cognitive systems involved in representing the world from infants' own perspective are also recruited for encoding others' beliefs. Such results point to an early-developing, powerful apparatus suitable to deal with multiple concurrent representations, and suggest that infants can have a metarepresentational understanding of other minds even before the onset of language.

KW - infant cognitive development

KW - social cognition

KW - object representation

KW - theory of mind

KW - metarepresentation

KW - CHIMPANZEE

KW - BELIEFS

KW - PEOPLE

U2 - 10.1098/rspb.2015.1683

DO - 10.1098/rspb.2015.1683

M3 - Journal article

VL - 282

JO - Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

JF - Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

SN - 0962-8436

IS - 1819

M1 - 20151683

ER -