Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Studies suggested that infants may track others' perspectives (Baillargeon et al., 2010; but see Dörrenberg, et al., 2018), showing altercentric effects (Kovács et al., 2010; Manea et al., 2023). However, it remains unknown whether infants can track multiple perspectives distinctively, a hallmark of real-world social interactions, and how this relates to their developing self-concept. We presented a search task to 15-to-18-month-olds (N=96), involving two agents with different perspectives (true/false-beliefs). We varied which agent prompted infants' search, and asked whether search is modulated by the prompter's perspective. Infants' displayed interference from the other's perspective when the false-belief agent made the prompt in the false-belief, but not the true-belief trials, and not when the true-belief agent made the prompts. Furthermore, such altercentric influences were unrelated to self-awareness, as measured by the Mirror Self-Recognition task. Thus, infants may sustain multiple other perspectives besides their own and rely on them differentially.