Is mentalizing for social evaluation? Studies with human infants.

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Typically developing humans are exquisitely tuned into mental states, readily thinking about what others intend, know, and believe. Indeed, mentalizing is imperative for key features of the human species including effective social learning and maintaining long-term cooperative relationships. Given the ubiquity and adaptiveness of mentalizing in human life, significant effort in the cognitive sciences has been dedicated to elucidating its underlying nature and developmental origins. In this research program, we will examine a particular hypothesis about the human mentalizing system via 3 streams of studies with preverbal infants, which stems both from past NSERC-supported work suggestive that infants may be particularly willing and/or able to mentalize within socially evaluative versus non-evaluative contexts [for instance, contexts where agents' mental states are prosocial or antisocial versus neutral or non-social], as well as from recent notorious failures to replicate key results within the developmental mentalizing literature. Specifically, we hypothesize that mentalizing develops first and foremost to facilitate effective social evaluation, allowing highly interdependent humans to cooperate effectively by readily distinguishing good from bad cooperative partners. From this primary function, humans come to apply their mentalizing capacities to reasoning about all kinds of agents in possession of all kinds of mental states. The proposed research examines 4 sub-hypotheses under the overarching hypothesis that mentalizing is for social evaluation via 3 research streams, using a multi-method approach including infant looking time, predictive looking, EEG/ERP, and fNIRS. Each stream will explore whether and to what extent infants are more likely to mentalize in socially evaluative contexts, through carefully controlled experiments comparing contexts more versus less relevant to social evaluation. Specifically, we will explore (1) if reasoning about social mental states is privileged relative to reasoning about physical mental states; (2) if reasoning about valenced social mental states is privileged relative to reasoning about neutral social mental states, especially negative ones; and (3) if once an agent has previously been identified as possessing valenced social mental states, especially negative ones, that agent will be particularly likely to engage mentalizing systems in the future, even while acting neutrally or non-socially. The proposed use of multiple distinct (but complementary) methods will provide training in cutting-edge research methods to a variety of Highly Qualified Personnel, and maximize our chances of acquiring crucial convergent evidence for our hypotheses. Together, these studies will serve to better elucidate the underlying nature of the human mentalizing system, informing our basic understanding of how and why we mentalize.