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Abstract
Johnson, Slaughter, and Carey [Dev. Sci. 1 (1998) 233.] used infants’ ability to follow
the ‘gaze’ of novel objects to claim that infants’ recognition of mentalistic agents is not
isomorphic with person recognition but rather based on a set of nonarbitrary object
recognition cues including the presence of a face and the ability to interact contingently with
other agents. The current studies extend these findings with data based on infant imitation
and the production of communicative gestures. The first study replicated Meltzoff’s [Dev.
Psychol. 31 (1995) 838.] reenactment of goals paradigm with a novel, nonhuman agent.
Fifteen-month-olds were found to reenact both the completed and uncompleted/unseen
goals of a novel object that had a face and interacted contingently with the experimenter and
infant. Concurrently, infants directed many communicative gestures at the object. A second
study excluded the possibility that the communicative gestures apparently directed at the
object in Study 1 were in fact imitations of the experimenter’s own behavior. The
suggestion that novel, nonhuman objects are capable of eliciting such divergent behaviors
as gaze-following, goal reenactment, and communicative gestures from infants, supports
the claim that all of these behaviors are mediated by a central conceptual notion of
mentalistic being, at least by the ages studied, and that that concept is not isomorphic with
the concept person. D 2001 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.
0885-2014/01/$ – see front matter D 2001 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.
PII: S 0 8 8 5 - 2 0 1 4 ( 0 1 ) 0 0 0 4 3 - 0
638 S.C. Johnson et al. / Cognitive Development 16 (2001) 637–656
1. Introduction
One commonly held position in the study of infant social cognition is that (1)
infants distinguish between people and nonpeople and (2) infants’ earliest
understanding of other minds maps directly onto this distinction. While the first
claim has been well documented, the second has been largely taken for granted
(see Johnson, 2000; Legerstee, 1992, 1994; Meltzoff, 1995; Poulin-Dubois,
1999; Wellman, 1993 for related reviews). This second point can be broken
down into two related questions. When do children first attribute mental states to
others and when they do, whom do they attribute mental states to? The answer to
these questions may well provide insight into the nature of the representational
systems underlying mentalistic reasoning.
Mental states are unobservable constructs that must be inferred by observers
rather than perceived directly. They are distinguished from other sorts of
unobservables or internal states by the specific kind of relationship they hold
with the world. That is, mental states are directed at the world; they are about
things. Other commonplace, commonsense unobservables (e.g., life, essences,
atoms, etc.), although presumed by lay thinkers to exist in the world, are not
presumed to be about the world. The ability to construe ourselves and others as
agents with mental states such as perceptions, attention, desires, and beliefs is
critical. With this mentalizing ability, we can communicate referentially, predict
and explain others’ behaviors, and manipulate both our own and others’ mental
states for the purposes of complex problem-solving and learning, not to mention
deception. Mentalizing is so critical, in fact, that its absence is thought by some
to be a central cause of autism (Baron-Cohen, 1995; Baron-Cohen, Tager-
Flusberg, & Cohen, 1993).
Garnering evidence sufficient to demonstrate mentalizing is difficult how-
ever. Many behaviors that could potentially serve as indices of mentalizing
(e.g., gaze-following, pointing, and goal imitation) can typically be interpreted
in both mentalistic and nonmentalistic ways. Nonmentalistic explanations
based on signal releasers, attentional enhancement, and object affordances
have all been proposed to explain the variety of behaviors produced by
prelinguistic infants (Butterworth & Jarrett, 1991; Gerwitz & Pelaez-Nogueras,
1992; Hood, Willen, & Driver, 1998; Moore & Corkum, 1994). The inter-
pretative problems are particularly acute for the attribution of mental states that
are correlated with reality (e.g., perception or goals) and can thus be mimicked
by conditioned or reality-driven behaviors. It was this problem that led Dennett
(1978) to suggest that the only convincing evidence for mentalizing must come
from successful reasoning about false beliefs, because false beliefs drive
behaviors not otherwise predicted by reality. Dennett’s argument motivated
an entire generation of research on the development of successful false belief
reasoning in children between the ages of 2 and 4 years (Flavell & Miller,
1998; Fodor, 1992; Gopnik & Astington, 1988; Leslie, 1994a; Wellman, 1993;
Wimmer & Perner, 1983).
S.C. Johnson et al. / Cognitive Development 16 (2001) 637–656 639
2. Study 1
2.1. Method
2.1.1. Participants
Fifty-six 15-month-olds (M = 15 months 12 days; range 14 months 27 days –
15 months 28 days) completed three conditions: Baseline (n = 20), Completed
Target Actions (Complete; n = 16), and Incompleted Target Actions (Incomplete;
n = 20). Infants were recruited through a mailing list of new parents in a mid-
Atlantic American city. Only healthy, full-term infants were included. Nine
infants were excluded for fussiness (2), experimenter error (3), equipment error
(1), and for failing to engage in the task by refusing to touch any toys (2; both in
the Complete condition).
642 S.C. Johnson et al. / Cognitive Development 16 (2001) 637–656
2.1.2. Materials
2.1.2.1. The agent. A store-bought stuffed orangutan was adapted in the lab to
fit these requirements (see Fig. 1). The orangutan was approximately the size of a
15-month-old infant, sitting 18 in. high and 12 in. wide. It was covered in long
reddish-brown fur, with black vinyl hands, feet, and belly. It also had a black
vinyl face with two brown glass eyes and a nose sculpted of the same black
fabric, but no mouth. The face was encircled with long white fur. The
orangutan’s arms and hands were modified to allow an experimenter to fit his
or her own hands and arms inside them in the manner of a puppeteer. When
operated by the puppeteer, the orangutan agent was capable of contingent and
reciprocal action with both the experimenter and infant as well as perceptually
guided and goal-directed behavior and possessed the morphological features of
both a face and hands. It also necessarily exhibited self-generated and bio-
logically real movement. The experimenter operating the orangutan never spoke
or produced any sounds.
2.1.2.2. The setup. The child was seated on a caretaker’s lap at a table. The
orangutan agent was seated on top of the table directly across from the infant.
The orangutan backed up against a floor-length curtain behind which sat the
puppeteer. Two holes were cut in the curtain, allowing the puppeteer to extend
Fig. 1. The novel agent for Study 1 (left) and the surrogate for Study 2 (right).
S.C. Johnson et al. / Cognitive Development 16 (2001) 637–656 643
her/his own arms through the curtain and into the arms of the orangutan (see
Fig. 2). The puppeteer’s own arms were never visible to the infant. The
puppeteer could watch the scene in front of the curtain via a TV monitor linked
to a videocamera that was mounted to the side of the setup and on which the
entire procedure was videotaped.
2.1.2.3. The objects. Four object sets compatible with the manual dexterity of
15-month-olds were selected, including beads in a cup, an elastic band on a peg, a
dumbbell, and a cap placed on a column (see Fig. 3).
2.1.3. Procedure
The experimental procedure followed Meltzoff’s (1995) original paradigm as
closely as possible. Infants were randomly assigned to one of the three
conditions: the Completed Action condition, the Incompleted Action condition,
or the Baseline condition.
2.1.3.1. The warm-up period. In all three conditions, the experimental trials
were preceded by a brief period designed to allow infants to acclimate to the
presence of the novel orangutan. The experimenter brought the infant into the
experimental room with their caretaker and introduced the infant to the
644 S.C. Johnson et al. / Cognitive Development 16 (2001) 637–656
orangutan. The experimenter called the agent by name (‘‘Tang’’) and encour-
aged the infant to wave and ‘‘say hello to Tang.’’ The agent also waved to the
infant at the experimenter’s request. The infant was then encouraged to play
with a warm-up toy — a wooden box with an accompanying block — in the
presence of the orangutan. A variety of holes were cut in the lid of the box so
that differently shaped blocks could be dropped through. The infant was
allowed to keep the toy briefly, then she was asked to pass it to ‘‘Tang’’ so
that ‘‘Tang could have a turn.’’ The agent reached out his hands to accept the
toy and played with it by dropping the block into one of the holes. The
S.C. Johnson et al. / Cognitive Development 16 (2001) 637–656 645
experimenter then asked him to give the toy back to the child. This continued
until the experimenter judged the child to be comfortable enough in the
orangutan’s presence to attend to the experimental task and had at least
touched the toy. In all cases, all of the information provided to the infant
about the orangutan and its behavioral capabilities during the warm-up period
was also available during the experimental trials. Following the warm-up
period, each infant completed four experimental object trials, including the
dumbbell, beads in a cup, an elastic band on a peg, and an inverted cup
placed on a column.
then with an exaggerated motion placed the cap on the column, leaving it resting
on top. In the Incompleted action, the agent went through the same motions but
never fully fit the cap into a level position on the column so that when it was
released it fell to the table. Again, the hands were alternated between attempts.
2.1.3.3. Baseline trials. In the Baseline condition, each trial began with the
child being allowed to manipulate the object(s) for 20 s. After the child
manipulated the object(s), they were given to the agent. The agent then randomly
manipulated them in a non-goal-directed way for 20 s. The agent was given a turn
with the objects in order to keep the overall level of activity, interest, and pace of
the trials comparable to the other conditions.
The order of objects was counterbalanced across all three conditions.
2.2. Results
Infants were said to have produced a target outcome if they satisfied the
following criteria.
Table 1
Mean target actions completed in Meltzoff’s replication with nonhuman agent
Individual objects Overall mean target
Condition Beads Dumbbell Cap Peg actions per trial
Baseline 0.10 (20) 0.15 (20) 0.16 (19) 0.00 (19) 0.10
Complete 0.75 (16) 0.50 (16) 0.56 (16) 0.27 (15) 0.52
Incomplete 0.47 (19) 0.30 (20) 0.55 (20) 0.16 (19) 0.37
Exact n’s for each cell are shown in parentheses.
648 S.C. Johnson et al. / Cognitive Development 16 (2001) 637–656
Table 2
Number of infants completing target actions in Meltzoff’s replication with nonhuman agent
Total number of infants
Condition Never completed target actions Completed one or more target actions
Baseline 12 (60) 8 (40)
Complete 1 (6) 15 (94)
Incomplete 4 (20) 16 (80)
Percentages shown in parentheses.
the group averages [Complete vs. Baseline c2(1) = 11.13, P < .001; Incomplete vs.
Baseline c2(1) = 6.67, P < .01; and Complete vs. Incomplete c2(1) = 1.40, n.s.].
Overall, these results replicate the patterns seen in Meltzoff’s (1995) original
reenactment paradigm. Not only were infants able to reproduce the same literal
outcomes of a series of actions produced by an agent on objects but they were
also able to produce the same target outcomes even when the agent tried but
failed to produce them himself. As argued by Meltzoff, this suggests that the
infants interpreted the agent’s actions in terms of the agent’s goals rather than the
spatiotemporal characteristics of the movements themselves.
3. Discussion
One major difference sets these results apart from Meltzoff’s. The goals in this
study were assigned to a nonhuman agent. This was true despite the fact that
infants are known to distinguish between people and nonpeople — as documented
by measures of attention, smiling, vocalizing, and reaching — even when the
nonhuman objects are perceptually or behaviorally similar to people as in the case
of dolls, animals, and contingently behaving robots (Legerstee, 1994, 1997;
Legerstee et al., 1987; Poulin-Dubois et al., 1996; Ricard & Allard, 1993). This
result therefore supports the prediction based on Johnson et al.’s (1998) claim that
infants attribute mentalism broadly, based on both the morphological and
behavioral features of objects — in this case, the presence of a face and hands,
self-generated movement, and contingent interactions with other social agents. It
is at some variance to Meltzoff’s (1995) claim that infants restrict their mental state
attributions to people. Nonetheless, both views agree that when infants reproduce
an unseen target action, they do so based on the attribution of a goal to the actor.
As with all paradigms searching for nonverbal evidence of mentalistic
reasoning, however, alternative explanations exist for the mentalistic interpreta-
tion of the goal reenactment paradigm. These alternative explanations are based
on very different underlying mechanisms than those found in the gaze-following
case but are nonetheless applicable to the novel agent in the current study. The
leading alternative in this paradigm is an explanation based on a combination of
stimulus enhancement and object-based ‘‘affordances.’’ In short, the social agent
serves to direct the infant’s attention to the object, who can then discover the
S.C. Johnson et al. / Cognitive Development 16 (2001) 637–656 649
4. Study 2
4.1. Method
4.1.1. Participants
Twenty-four 15-month-olds (M = 15 months 15 days; range 15 months 2
days –15 months 30 days) were tested in two conditions based on a modified
version of the Baseline condition of the goal reenactment study, an Agent
condition (n = 11) and a Surrogate condition (n = 13).
4.1.2. Materials
In the Agent condition, the orangutan from Study 1 was used. It was thus
capable of contingent and reciprocal action with both the experimenter and infant
as well as perceptually guided behavior and possessed the morphological features
of both a face and hands. It also necessarily exhibited self-generated and
biologically real movement. In the Surrogate condition, a new object was designed
that was roughly perceptually and morphologically similar to the orangutan
(Fig. 1) but incapable of self-generated movements of any sort — contingent,
reciprocal, perceptually guided, or biologically real. The surrogate was created by
covering a common table lamp of approximately the same size and proportions as
the orangutan with padding and a soft reddish-brown fabric. Like the orangutan,
it sat 18 in. high and 12 in. wide. A set of visually complex black and brown
features were attached to the lamp’s otherwise white shade in lieu of a face, and a
small, black, operational turntable was attached to the base of the lamp in lieu of
manipulatible hands. Thus, for the most part, both novel objects were soft
reddish-brown shapes, with black and white peripherals.
4.2. Procedure
Infants were guided through a prescribed interaction with either the agent or
surrogate. In both conditions, the experimenter talked throughout the procedure
S.C. Johnson et al. / Cognitive Development 16 (2001) 637–656 651
4.2.1. Waves
First infants were introduced to the agent/surrogate by name (‘‘Tang’’ for the
orangutan and ‘‘Bob’’ for the lamp) and invited to wave to it. In the Agent
condition, the orangutan waved to the infant in response. In the ‘‘passive’’
condition, the experimenter turned the lamp’s light on and off (and then removed
her hands quickly in order to minimize the time they appeared in the visual field
around the lamp’s ‘‘head’’).
4.3. Results
1
It is important to note that although the passive events in the surrogate’s script were physical
rather than psychological events, we do not believe that this constitutes a confound. This is because
physical actions on agents are not considered category mistakes and are not by themselves cues to
category membership. People touch each other, push each other, and pull each other’s hair or clothing.
Such actions are not taken as evidence that the recipient is not an agent or that the actor does not
conceive of the recipient as an agent. Infants’ reactions to these scenarios were recorded on videotape.
652 S.C. Johnson et al. / Cognitive Development 16 (2001) 637–656
Table 3
Mean number of communicative/social gestures per infant directed at the novel objects in Study 2
Behaviors
Condition Greetings Offers Requests Gaze alternation Withdrawal
Orangutan 2.36 2.09 0.54 11.91 0.82
Lamp 0.92 0.38 0.15 3.31 0.00
and direction of gaze. The five categories were Greetings, Offers, Requests,
Gaze Alternation, and Withdrawals. Greetings were counted anytime the infant
lifted the fingers of the hand toward the agent/surrogate in a wave-like motion
while simultaneously looking at the agent/surrogate. Offers were counted each
time the infant held an object out toward the agent/surrogate while simulta-
neously shifting her gaze from the object to the agent/surrogate. Requests
were credited to the infant each time she extended her empty hand toward the
agent/surrogate as the agent/surrogate possessed the object while simultane-
ously shifting her gaze from the object to the agent/surrogate. A Withdrawal
was credited each time the baby actively pulled back from the agent/surrogate
by arching her back or pulling in her hands while glancing at least once at the
agent. Finally, a single act of Gaze Alternation with the agent/surrogate was
credited anytime the infant shifted her gaze from the object to the agent/
surrogate in the absence of other gestural actions. The two coders reached
93% agreement.
The sex of the infants had no effect on the results of a preliminary analysis and
will not be discussed further. As seen in Table 3, infants were quite unlikely to
direct these gestures at the passive lamp, despite the fact that the experimenter
herself both directed gestures at the lamp and talked to it in a communicative
manner. An analysis of variance with condition and gesture as variables showed
that infants were much more likely to produce the target behaviors in the presence
of the contingently behaving orangutan than they were in the presence of the
lamp [ F(1,22) = 22.26, P < .0001]. Furthermore, this result held even when the
disproportionately frequent gaze alternation behaviors were removed from the
analysis [ F(1,22) = 10.03, P < .005]. It appears therefore that infants’ communi-
cative interactions with the orangutan agent, both in this study and in Study 1,
were probably due to infants’ interpretation of the agent itself and not to imitation
of the experimenter’s behavior.
5. General discussion
It was hypothesized that by the beginning of the second year, (1) infants’ have
the ability to attribute mental states to others and (2) that this ability is not
restricted to people. Furthermore, it was argued that the degree to which
putatively mentalistic attributions can be elicited across multiple behavioral
S.C. Johnson et al. / Cognitive Development 16 (2001) 637–656 653
Acknowledgments
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