We examine whether infants and young children experience “conflict” between their own perspective and that of another in a false belief scenario. Based on the altercentric hypothesis, we propose that young infants can track the perspective of others because they lack a competing self-perspective. With the emergence of self-awareness, children may then be able to generate a representation of their own perspective and only then does this become a competitor to the perspective cued by others. To test this, we presented 18- and 42-month-olds with a perspective-conflict scenario and used pupil diameter as an index of conflicting processing. Half of the 18-month-olds passed the mirror self-recognition (MSR) task. Functional t-tests showed that MSR recognizers had greater dilation during the anticipatory phase compared to non-recognizers. Data collection with 42-month-olds is ongoing; preliminary results from pilot data suggests that the pupil trace of the 42-month-olds is similar to the MSR recognizers.

In a preregistered pupillometry study we tested whether a perspective cue can both increase and decrease 7.5-month-olds' surprise. In the congruent condition infants saw an agent watching a ball roll behind an occluder. After the agent left, infants saw the ball rolling outside the stage (an informational asymmetry). In the baseline the agent watched the final event as well. At outcome, the occluder was lowered to reveal empty space: congruent with reality, as the ball is out. In the incongruent condition the outcome is identical, but the ball should have been there. Informational asymmetry was manipulated again. We found overall larger pupil dilation in the incongruent condition, indicating infants’ remembering the ball’s existence. As hypothesised, we could increase their surprise in the congruent condition by having the agent last see the ball inside, but found mixed results when trying to use the perspective cue to also decrease infants’ surprise.

We examine whether development of self-awareness influences infants’ ability to track and use others’ perspectives to make belief-based action predictions. Based on the altercentric hypothesis (Southgate, 2020), we expect that infants who do not yet have a self-perspective to make more accurate predictions of an agent’s actions on a non-verbal mentalizing task (NVMT) compared to infants who may encode the other’s and their own conflicting perspective. To test this, we presented 18-month-olds, half of whom passed the mirror self-recognition (MSR) task, with a NVMT and used anticipatory looking as a measure of action-based attribution. Contrary to our hypothesis, preliminary findings with 32 infants using the differential looking score, suggest that those who pass the MSR task are more accurate in their anticipatory looking compared to infants who do not pass the MSR task. All other preregistered analyses will be conducted once data collection is complete in June 2021.

The N400 is an ERP component sensitive to semantic violations. Here, we probed if infants’ detection of a mismatch is subject to an altercentric bias: a bias by another person’s perspective. We hid the object in a box at the time of labelling, so its representation had to be maintained. Exp.1 established that 14-month-olds detect when an occluded object is labelled incorrectly (t(27)=2.12, p=0.043). Exp.2 included a perspective mismatch, and labelling was always incongruent for the infant, but in 50% congruent for the other. We found a reduced N400 for the congruent-for-other trials (t(33)=-2.19, p=.036), indicating an altercentric influence on infants’ semantic mismatch detection. Exp.3 probes whether infants detect any incongruence from their perspective when the labelling is always consistent for the other. Preliminary analyses (n=22 out of 34 pre-registered) show no effect of congruency from infants’ perspective, suggesting that congruency for the other may override infants’ own mismatch detection.