Publications of Király, I.
Electrophysiological investigation of infants’ understanding of understanding. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience. 2020;43:1-8.
Electrophysiological investigation of infants’ understanding of understanding
Social cognition might play a critical role in language acquisition and comprehension, as mindreading may be necessary to infer the intended meaning of linguistic expressions uttered by communicative partners. In three electrophysiological experiments, we explored the interplay between belief attribution and language comprehension of 14-month-old infants. First, we replicated our earlier finding: infants produced an N400 effect to correctly labelled objects when the labels did not match a communicative partner’s beliefs about the referents. Second, we observed no N400 when we replaced the object with another category member. Third, when we named the objects incorrectly for infants, but congruently with the partner’s false belief, we observed large N400 responses, suggesting that infants retained their own perspective in addition to that of the partner. We thus interpret the observed social N400 effect as a communicational expectancy indicator because it was contingent not on the attribution of false beliefs but on semantic expectations by both the self and the communicative partner. Additional exploratory analyses revealed an early, frontal, positive- going electrophysiological response in all three experiments, which was contingent on infants’ computing the comprehension of the social partner based on attributed beliefs.
Retrospective attribution of false beliefs in 3-year-old children. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 2018;115(45):11477-82.
Retrospective attribution of false beliefs in 3-year-old children.
A current debate in psychology and cognitive science concerns the nature of young children’s ability to attribute and track others’ beliefs. Beliefs can be attributed in at least two different ways: prospectively, during the observation of belief-inducing situations, and in a retrospective manner, based on episodic retrieval of the details of the events that brought about the beliefs. We developed a task in which only retrospective attribution, but not prospective belief tracking, would allow children to correctly infer that someone had a false belief. Eighteen- and 36-month-old children observed a displacement event, which was witnessed by a person wearing sunglasses (Experiment 1). Having later discovered that the sunglasses were opaque, 36-month-olds correctly inferred that the person must have formed a false belief about the location of the objects and used this inference in resolving her referential expressions. They successfully performed retrospective revision in the opposite direction as well, correcting a mistakenly attributed false belief when this was necessary (Experiment 3). Thus, children can compute beliefs retrospectively, based on episodic memories, well before they pass explicit false-belief tasks. Eighteen-month-olds failed in such a task, suggesting that they cannot retrospectively attribute beliefs or revise their initial belief attributions. However, an additional experiment provided evidence for prospective tracking of false beliefs in 18-month-olds (Experiment 2). Beyond identifying two different modes for tracking and updating others’ mental states early in development, these results also provide clear evidence of episodic memory retrieval in young children.
On pedagogy. Developmental Science. 2007;10(1):139-46.
Shifting “goals”: Clarifying some misconceptions about the teleological stance in young infants. Consciousness and Cognition. 2003;12(4):773-6.
The early origins of goal attribution in infancy. Consciousness and Cognition. 2003;12(4):752-69.
The early origins of goal attribution in infancy
We contrast two positions concerning the initial domain of actions that infants interpret as goal-directed. The [`]narrow scope' view holds that goal-attribution in 6- and 9-month-olds is restricted to highly familiar actions (such as grasping) ([Woodward et al., 2001]). The cue-based approach of the infant's [`]teleological stance' ( [Gergely and Csibra, 2003]), however, predicts that if the cues of equifinal variation of action and a salient action effect are present, young infants can attribute goals to a [`]wide scope' of entities including unfamiliar human actions and actions of novel objects lacking human features. It is argued that previous failures to show goal-attribution to unfamiliar actions were due to the absence of these cues. We report a modified replication of [Woodward, 1999] showing that when a salient action-effect is presented, even young infants can attribute a goal to an unfamiliar manual action. This study together with other recent experiments reviewed support the [`]wide scope' approach indicating that if the cues of goal-directedness are present even 6-month-olds attribute goals to unfamiliar actions.
Rational imitation in preverbal infants. Vol 415.; 2002.
Rational imitation of goal-directed actions in 14-month-olds. In: Proceedings of Cogsci 2001. London: LEA; 2001. p. 309-15.
Intencionális cselekvések utánzásának és teleológiai értelmezésének viszonya csecsemőknél: A racionális utánzás elmélete. In: Kampis G, Ropolyi L, editors. Evolúció és megismerés. Budapest: Typotex; 2001. p. 105-17.