Victoria Southgate

Mindblind Eyes: An Absence of Spontaneous Theory of Mind in Asperger Syndrome

Diverting Asperger Deficit Placement of Asperger syndrome within the family of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) has always been a bit uneasy; although people with Asperger syndrome do exhibit the core impairments in social interaction and communication that are characteristic of ASD, they nevertheless perform well on tests that are thought to assess the ability to mentalize or to possess Theory of Mind skills. One of the classic tests of mentalizing ability is the false-belief task, in which subjects must be able to represent their own beliefs (true) and anothers beliefs, which are false because they have not been given complete information, such as not having seen the transfer of a piece of candy from one drawer to another. People with Asperger syndrome succeed at the verbal form of the false-belief task, yet Senju et al. (p. 883, published online 16 July) show that this is owing entirely to their having learned how to cope with an existing and still demonstrable deficit in an implicit version of the false-belief task. That is, the core impairment is present, but conscious and explicit learning allows them to compensate. Asperger syndrome individuals do not pass a nonverbal false-belief test. Adults with Asperger syndrome can understand mental states such as desires and beliefs (mentalizing) when explicitly prompted to do so, despite having impairments in social communication. We directly tested the hypothesis that such individuals nevertheless fail to mentalize spontaneously. To this end, we used an eye-tracking task that has revealed the spontaneous ability to mentalize in typically developing infants. We showed that, like infants, neurotypical adults’ (n = 17 participants) eye movements anticipated an actor’s behavior on the basis of her false belief. This was not the case for individuals with Asperger syndrome (n = 19). Thus, these individuals do not attribute mental states spontaneously, but they may be able to do so in explicit tasks through compensatory learning.

Motor System Activation Reveals Infants’ On-Line Prediction of Others’ Goals

Despite much research demonstrating infants’ abilities to attribute goals to others’ actions, it is unclear whether infants can generate on-line predictions about action outcomes, an ability crucial for the human propensity to cooperate and collaborate with others. This lack of evidence is mainly due to methodological limitations restricting the interpretation of behavioral data. Here, we exploited the fact that observers’ motor systems are recruited during the observation of goal-directed actions. We presented 9-month-old infants with part of an action. For this action to be interpreted as goal directed, the infants would need to predict an outcome for the action. Measuring the attenuation of the sensorimotor alpha signal during observation of action, we found that infants exhibited evidence of motor activation only if the observed action permitted them to infer a likely outcome. This result provides evidence for on-line goal prediction in infancy, and our method offers a new way to explore infants’ cognitive abilities.

Do 18-Month-Olds Really Attribute Mental States to Others? A Critical Test

In the research reported here, we investigated whether 18-month-olds would use their own past experience of visual access to attribute perception and consequent beliefs to other people. Infants in this study wore either opaque blindfolds (opaque condition) or trick blindfolds that looked opaque but were actually transparent (trick condition). Then both groups of infants observed an actor wearing one of the same blindfolds that they themselves had experienced, while a puppet removed an object from its location. Anticipatory eye movements revealed that infants who had experienced opaque blindfolds expected the actor to behave in accordance with a false belief about the object’s location, but that infants who had experienced trick blindfolds did not exhibit that expectation. Our results suggest that 18-month-olds used self-experience with the blindfolds to assess the actor’s visual access and to update her belief state accordingly. These data constitute compelling evidence that 18-month-olds infer perceptual access and appreciate its causal role in altering the epistemic states of other people.

Belief-based action prediction in preverbal infants

Highlights • 6-month-olds consider others’ mental states when predicting their actions.• We use sensorimotor alpha suppression as a neural correlate of action prediction.• Infants predict an action only when the person’s belief should lead them to act.

Nine-months-old infants do not need to know what the agent prefers in order to reason about its goals: on the role of preference and persistence in infants' goal-attribution.

Human infants readily interpret others’ actions as goal-directed and their understanding of previous goals shapes their expectations about an agent’s future goal-directed behavior in a changed situation. According to a recent proposal (Luo & Baillargeon, 2005), infants’ goal-attributions are not sufficient to support such expectations if the situational change involves broadening the set of choice-options available to the agent, and the agent’s preferences among this broadened set are not known. The present study falsifies this claim by showing that 9-month-olds expect the agent to continue acting towards the previous goal even if additional choice-options become available for which there is no preference-related evidence. We conclude that infants do not need to know about the agent’s preferences in order to form expectations about its goal-directed actions. Implications for the role of action persistency and action selectivity are discussed.

Motor Activation During the Prediction of Nonexecutable Actions in Infants

Although it is undeniable that the motor system is recruited when people observe others’ actions, the inferences that the brain generates from motor activation and the mechanisms involved in the motor system’s recruitment are still unknown. Here, we challenged the popular hypothesis that motor involvement in action observation enables the observer to identify and predict an agent’s goal by matching observed actions with existing and corresponding motor representations. Using a novel neural indication of action prediction—sensorimotor-cortex activation measured by electroencephalography—we demonstrated that 9-month-old infants recruit their motor system whenever a context suggests an impending action, but that this recruitment is not dependent on being able to match the observed action with a corresponding motor representation. Our data are thus inconsistent with the view that action prediction depends on motor correspondence; instead, they support an alternative view in which motor activation is the result of, rather than the cause of, goal identification.

Infants Learn What They Want to Learn: Responding to Infant Pointing Leads to Superior Learning

The majority of current developmental models prioritise a pedagogical approach to knowledge acquisition in infancy, in which infants play a relatively passive role as recipients of information. In view of recent evidence, demonstrating that infants use pointing to express interest and solicit information from adults, we set out to test whether giving the child the leading role in deciding what information to receive leads to better learning. Sixteen-month-olds were introduced to pairs of novel objects and, once they had pointed to an object, were shown a function for either the object they had chosen, or the object they had ignored. Ten minutes later, infants replicated the functions of chosen objects significantly more than those of un-chosen objects, despite having been equally visually attentive during demonstrations on both types of objects. These results show that offering information in response to infants’ communicative gestures leads to superior learning (Experiment 1) and that this difference in performance is due to learning being facilitated when infants’ pointing was responded to, not hindered when their pointing was ignored (Experiment 2), highlighting the importance of infants’ own active engagement in acquiring information.

Distinct processing of objects and faces in the infant brain

Previous work has shown that gamma-band electroencephalogram oscillations recorded over the posterior cortex of infants play a role in maintaining object representations during occlusion. Although it is not yet known what kind of representations are reflected in these oscillations, behavioral data suggest that young infants maintain spatiotemporal (but not featural) information during the occlusion of graspable objects, and surface feature (but not spatiotemporal) information during the occlusion of faces. To further explore this question, we presented infants with an occlusion paradigm in which they would, on half of the trials, see surface feature violations of either a face or an object. Based on previous studies, we predicted higher gamma-band activation when infants were presented with a surface feature violation of a face, but not of an object. These results were confirmed. A further analysis revealed that whereas infants exhibited a significant increase in gamma during the occlusion of an object (as reported in previous studies), no such increase was evident during the occlusion of a face. These data suggest markedly different processing of objects and faces in the infant brain and, furthermore, indicate that the representation underpinned by the posterior gamma increase may contain only spatiotemporal information.

Do infants provide evidence that the mirror system is involved in action understanding

Highlights • This paper critically examines whether infant data provide support for the mirror neuron theory of action understanding.• It proposes alternative interpretations of the infant data.• Situates the infant data within an alternative framework in which the motor system is involved in action prediction.

Infants’ preferences for native speakers are associated with an expectation of information

Significance This paper addresses the possible developmental origins of humans’ preference for native speakers. Infants’ preference to attend to someone speaking their native language is well documented and has been interpreted as a developmental precursor of our adult tendency to divide the social world into groups, preferring members of one’s own group and disfavoring others. Here we propose that this preference may originate from infants’ desire to acquire information and therefore preferentially interact with social partners who are more likely to provide them with relevant learning opportunities. We demonstrate that 11-mo-old infants indeed expect to receive information from native as opposed to foreign speakers, suggesting that infants’ selective social interactions may be driven by their motivation to learn. Humans’ preference for others who share our group membership is well documented, and this heightened valuation of in-group members seems to be rooted in early development. Before 12 mo of age, infants already show behavioral preferences for others who evidence cues to same-group membership such as race or native language, yet the function of this selectivity remains unclear. We examine one of these social biases, the preference for native speakers, and propose that this preference may result from infants’ motivation to obtain information and the expectation that interactions with native speakers will provide better opportunities for learning. To investigate this hypothesis, we measured EEG theta activity, a neural rhythm shown to index active and selective preparation for encoding information in adults. In study 1, we established that 11-mo-old infants exhibit an increase in theta activation in situations when they can expect to receive information. We then used this neural measure of anticipatory theta activity to explore the expectations of 11-mo-olds when facing social partners who either speak the infants’ native language or a foreign tongue (study 2). A larger increase in theta oscillations was observed when infants could expect to receive information from the native speaker, indicating that infants were preparing to learn information from the native speaker to a greater extent than from the foreign speaker. While previous research has demonstrated that infants prefer to interact with knowledgeable others, the current experiments provide evidence that such an information-seeking motive may also underpin infants’ demonstrated preference for native speakers.