Accepted author manuscript, 210 KB, PDF document
Available under license: CC BY: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Rights statement: C 2015 The Authors. Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.
Final published version, 767 KB, PDF document
Available under license: CC BY: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Final published version
Licence: CC BY: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Neural signatures for sustaining object representations attributed to others in preverbal human infants. / Kampis, Dora; Parise, Eugenio; Csibra, Gergely et al.
In: Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, Vol. 282, No. 1819, 20151683, 11.11.2015.Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - Neural signatures for sustaining object representations attributed to others in preverbal human infants
AU - Kampis, Dora
AU - Parise, Eugenio
AU - Csibra, Gergely
AU - Kovács, Ágnes
N1 - C 2015 The Authors. Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.
PY - 2015/11/11
Y1 - 2015/11/11
N2 - A major feat of social beings is to encode what their conspecifics see, know or believe. While various nonhuman animals show precursors of these abilities, humans perform uniquely sophisticated inferences about other people’s mental states. However, it is still unclear how these possibly human-specific capacities develop and whether preverbal infants, similarly to adults form representations of other agents’ mental states, specifically metarepresentations. We explored the neuro-cognitive bases of 8-month-olds’ ability to encode the world from another person’s perspective, using gamma-band EEG activity over the temporal lobes, an established neural signature for sustained object representation after occlusion. We observed such gamma-band activity when an object was occluded from the infants’ perspective, as well as when it was occluded only from the other person (Experiment 1), and also when subsequently the object disappeared but the person falsely believed the object to be present (Experiment 2). These findings suggest that the cognitive systems involved in representing the world from infants’ own perspective are also recruited for encoding others’ beliefs. Such results point to an early developing, powerful apparatus suitable to deal with multiple concurrent representations; and suggest that infants can have a metarepresentational understanding of other minds even before the onset of language.
AB - A major feat of social beings is to encode what their conspecifics see, know or believe. While various nonhuman animals show precursors of these abilities, humans perform uniquely sophisticated inferences about other people’s mental states. However, it is still unclear how these possibly human-specific capacities develop and whether preverbal infants, similarly to adults form representations of other agents’ mental states, specifically metarepresentations. We explored the neuro-cognitive bases of 8-month-olds’ ability to encode the world from another person’s perspective, using gamma-band EEG activity over the temporal lobes, an established neural signature for sustained object representation after occlusion. We observed such gamma-band activity when an object was occluded from the infants’ perspective, as well as when it was occluded only from the other person (Experiment 1), and also when subsequently the object disappeared but the person falsely believed the object to be present (Experiment 2). These findings suggest that the cognitive systems involved in representing the world from infants’ own perspective are also recruited for encoding others’ beliefs. Such results point to an early developing, powerful apparatus suitable to deal with multiple concurrent representations; and suggest that infants can have a metarepresentational understanding of other minds even before the onset of language.
U2 - 10.1098/rspb.2015.1683
DO - 10.1098/rspb.2015.1683
M3 - Journal article
VL - 282
JO - Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
JF - Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
SN - 0962-8452
IS - 1819
M1 - 20151683
ER -