https://courses.washington.edu/anmind/Call%20&%20Tomasello%20-%20chimp%20TOM%20-%20TICS%202008.pdf

Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind? 30 years later.

At around 1 year of age, human infants display a number of new behaviors that seem to indicate a newly emerging understanding of other persons as intentional beings whose attention to outside objects may be shared, followed into, and directed in various ways. These behaviors have mostly been studied separately. In the current study, we investigated the most important of these behaviors together as they emerged in a single group of 24 infants between 9 and 15 months of age. At each of seven monthly visits, we measured joint attentional engagement, gaze and point following, imitation of two different kinds of actions on objects, imperative and declarative gestures, and comprehension and production of language. We also measured several nonsocial-cognitive skills as a point of comparison. We report two studies. The focus of the first study was the initial emergence of infants' social-cognitive skills and how these skills are related to one another developmentally. We found a reliable pattern of emergence: Infants progressed from sharing to following to directing others' attention and behavior. The nonsocial skills did not emerge predictably in this developmental sequence. Furthermore, correlational analyses showed that the ages of emergence of all pairs of the social-cognitive skills or their components were inter-related. The focus of the second study was the social interaction of infants and their mothers, especially with regard to their skills of joint attentional engagement (including mothers' use of language to follow into or direct infants' attention) and how these skills related to infants' early communicative competence. Our measures of communicative competence included not only language production, as in previous studies, but also language comprehension and gesture production. It was found that two measures--the amount of time infants spent in joint engagement with their mothers and the degree to which mothers used language that followed into their infant's focus of attention--predicted infants' earliest skills of gestural and linguistic communication. Results of the two studies are discussed in terms of their implications for theories of social-cognitive development, for theories of language development, and for theories of the process by means of which human children become fully participating members of the cultural activities and processes into which they are born.

Social Cognition, joint attention and communicative Competence from 9 to 15 months of age

The mentalizing (theory of mind) system of the brain is probably in operation from ca. 18 months of age, allowing implicit attribution of intentions and other mental states. Between the ages of 4 and 6 years explicit mentalizing becomes possible, and from this age children are able to explain the misleading reasons that have given rise to a false belief. Neuroimaging studies of mentalizing have so far only been carried out in adults. They reveal a system with three components consistently activated during both implicit and explicit mentalizing tasks: medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), temporal poles and posterior superior temporal sulcus (STS). The functions of these components can be elucidated, to some extent, from their role in other tasks used in neuroimaging studies. Thus, the MPFC region is probably the basis of the decoupling mechanism that distinguishes mental state representations from physical state representations; the STS region is probably the basis of the detection of agency, and the temporal poles might be involved in access to social knowledge in the form of scripts. The activation of these components in concert appears to be critical to mentalizing.

/pdf/development-and-neurophysiology-of-mentalizing-3mxlcttihw.pdf

Development and neurophysiology of mentalizing.

https://autismtruths.org/pdf/SimonBaronCohen_The%20extreme-male-brain%20theory%20of%20autism.pdf

The extreme male brain theory of autism

Preface Domain specificity: an introduction Lawrence Hirschfeld and Susan Gelman Part I. General/Theoretical Approaches: 1. The modularity of thought Dan Sperber 2. Domain specificity and cultural variation are not inconsistent: lessons from number and music Rochel Gelman and Kimberly Brenneman Part II. Are Domains Theories?: 3. The theory theory Alison Gopkin and Henry Wellman 4. Thinking by children and scientists: false analogies and neglected similarities Paul Harris 5. Core domains versus scientific theories: evidence from systematics and Itzaj-Maya folkbiology Scott Atran 6. Essences and folk theories of biology Susan Gelman, John Coley and Gail Gottfried Part III. Origins of Domain Knowledge, Biology and Evolutionary Approaches: 7. The organization of lexical knowledge in the brain: evidence from category- and modality-specific deficits Alfonso Caramazza, Argye Hillis, Elwyn Keek and Michele Miozzo 8. Origins of domain-specificity: the evolution of functional organization Leda Cosmides and John Tobby 9. Tomm and Toby: core architecture and domain specificity Alan Leslie 10. 'Moral belief' form vs. content David Premack 11. Domain specific knowledge and conceptual change Susan Carey and Elizabeth Spelke 12. Is the acquisition of social categories based on domain-specific competence or on knowledge transfer? Lawrence Hirschfield 13. The birth and nurturance of concepts by domains: the origins of concepts of living things Frank Keil Part IV. Domains Across Cultures and Languages: 14. Cognitive constraints on cultural representation: natural ontologies and religious ideas Pascal Boyer 15. Universal and culture-specific properties of children's mental models of the earth Stella Vosniadou 16. Cognitive domains and the structure of the lexicon Anna Wierzbicka Part V. Implications for Education: 17. 'Teachers' models of children's minds and learning Sidney Strauss and Tamar Shilony 18. 'Situated rationalism' biological and social preparation for learning Lauren Resnick.

/pdf/mapping-the-mind-domain-specificity-in-cognition-and-culture-4n8f3uqce1.pdf

Mapping the Mind: Domain Specificity In Cognition And Culture

A series of experiments is reported which show that three successive mechanisms are involved in the first 18 months of life in ‘looking where someone else is looking’. The earliest ‘ecological’ mechanism enables the infant to detect the direction of the adult's visual gaze within the baby's visual field but the mother's signal alone does not allow the precise localization of the target. Joint attention to the same physical object also depends on the intrinsic, attention-capturing properties of the object in the environment. By about 12 months, we have evidence for presence of a new ‘geometric’ mechanism. The infant extrapolates from the orientation of the mother's head and eyes, the intersection of the mother's line of sight within a relatively precise zone of the infant's own visual space. A third ‘representational’ mechanism emerges between 12 and 18 months, with an extension of joint reference to places outside the infant's visual field.

None of these mechanisms require the infant to have a theory that others have minds; rather the perceptual systems of different observers ‘meet’ in encountering the same objects and events in the world. Such a ‘realist’ basis for interpersonal knowledge may offer an alternative starting point for development of intrapersonal knowledge, rather than the view that mental events can only be known by construction of a theory.

What minds have in common is space : Spatial mechanisms serving joint visual attention in infancy

The ontogeny and phylogeny of joint visual attention.

The spontaneous motor activity of 15 new-born babies was filmed and their arm and hand movements analysed in slow motion to yield detailed measurements of the interrelation between hand, head and mouth postures. These analyses revealed that new-borns can move the hand to the mouth either directly or indirectly via the perioral region of the face. The mouth is open in ‘anticipation’ of arrival of the hand and the movement does not require visual guidance. This little-known coordination may have important implications for theories of intersensorimotor relations and for the origins of intentionality.

George Butterworth

Papers

What minds have in common is space : Spatial mechanisms serving joint visual attention in infancy

The ontogeny and phylogeny of joint visual attention.

Hand-mouth coordination in the new-born baby

Joint Visual Attention in Infancy

The origins of referential communication in human infancy.