COMPARATIVE COGNITIVE STUDY OF DEVELOPMENT OF OTHER'S MIND CONCEPT

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In this project, I investigated how infants develop the concept of others' mind. I conducted several experimental studies concern to this topic. The main findings are summarized as follows: 1) in the false belief task with robot, children seemed to attribute false belief to the robot, but they did not attribute mental verb (e.g. think) to the robot. There seems to be differentiation between robot and human in this area. 2) dual representation is needed to represent others' mind for children. I investigated the development of dual representation by using scale-model task in young children. The result shows that they develop understanding dual representation rapidly between 2and half years old and 3 years old. 3) How the children correspond between live events and events which were shown in TV. From the comparative perspective, I tried to figure out what happens in nonhuman primate, gibbon, in object-choice task. In one condition, gibbon could see bating procedure directly, and in the other condition, the subject could see it in only TV monitor. The results show that there is no difference in these two conditions. Now we are continuing to collect data in human children in the same situations. 4) We investigated whether human infants attribute mental state to animation object on the computer screen. Infants prefer the object which seems to help another object.