Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Studies suggest that infants track others' beliefs based on visual information (Scott & Baillargeon, 2017 but see Dörrenberg, Rakoczy, Liszkowski, 2018). However, research targeting whether infants understand that others' beliefs can be induced via communication is scarce, although most of the human belief-repertoire is acquired via communication. We presented eighteen-month-olds (Experiment1:N=34; Experiment2-replication:N=35) with a false belief (FB) scenario where the initial belief was induced via communication, aiming to measure their informative pointing (for an agent mistaken about a toy's location compared to a true belief scenario). Instead of more pointing to the toy's current location, in the FB condition we found an unexpected ‚Äòaltercentric' effect: infants pointed more to the empty location where the agent falsely believed the object to be). Next, we asked whether infants show different altercentric effects for visually induced beliefs (Experiment3: N=35). Results replicated the altercentric effect, suggesting a potentially stronger encoding of visually induced beliefs.