Can Young Children Understand Others' Mental States?

Part of the process of mentalizing involves the understanding of others' mental states, as well as the acknowledgment that others may hold false beliefs. Mentalizing is an important topic in social neuroscience research since it is what we use to explain the behavior of others, and ultimately to empathize and relate to people other than ourselves. Much of the research regarding theory of mind questions has held the belief that young children are not capable of understanding mental states in others. In fact, one group of researchers concluded that preschoolers could not comprehend the idea that people may have false beliefs, after results of their study demonstrated the failure of this age group in completing verbal tasks that dealt with false beliefs in others.

A more recent wave of research however, is re-exploring these previously accepted notions regarding the mental capabilities of young children. One particular study, published in Science and undertaken by Kristine Onishi & Renee Baillargeon suggests that 15-month old infants can understand false beliefs. A non-verbal task was run on the infants in which they were required to predict future behaviors of a person based on their belief as to where a toy was hidden. Results of the study indicated that infants appealed to the differences between true and false beliefs in their prediction of future behavior.

This is an interesting result, in that it suggests that even babies can undertake the process of mentalizing that allows us to understand what drives other people's behavior. Additional research needs to be done in this area to give more conclusive information, however I think this is a pretty bold start.