Starting from 9 months old to 14 months old, Baron-Cohen’s model (1997) suggests that infants can achieve the first three components of the human mindreading model (mental metarepresentations), which are the intentionality detector (ID), eye direction detector (EDD), and emotion detector (TED). Studies suggest that the ability of so-called intentionality detection may even start to develop before 9 months of age. For example, by 7 months of age, infants form expectations of efficiency to different agents (e.g., Kamewari et al., 2005), and by 8 months of age, infants expect state changes to be related to human hands but not to other self-propelled objects (e.g., Muentener & Carey, 2010). Moreover, when observing launching events, 11-month-old infants can use self-propulsion as a cue for animacy (e.g., Stahl & Feigenson, 2015).
Based on these three main findings, our studies will compare the perception of causality and animacy in pet dogs and human infants. We will use the pupillometry technique for gaze behavior and additionally measure infants’ and pet dogs’ exploration behavior. The ability to recognize animate objects (a feature of an intentionality detector) increases the chances of survival (Rees, 2008). Both pet dogs and humans share the same physical environment and a similar social environment and the domestication of dogs by humans has influenced their evolution (Hare et al., 2002; Range & Virányi, 2015), making them suitable for comparative studies. Our studies correspond to (even if not based on) Baron-Cohen’s intentionality detector of mindreading model incorporated with an evolutionary framework, and aim to understand the evolutionary roots of animacy and causality perception. However, it should be noted that our evolutionary perspective does not formulate the massive modularity hypothesis as cognitive modules. Also even though we do not use a Bayesian framework in our studies, I think our approach can also be adapted to the Bayesian framework.
References
Baron-Cohen, S. (1997). Mindblindness: An essay on autism and theory of mind. MIT press.
Hare, B., Brown, M., Williamson, C., & Tomasello, M. (2002). The domestication of social cognition in dogs. Science, 298(5598), 1634–1636. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1072702
Kamewari, K., Kato, M., Kanda, T., Ishiguro, H., & Hiraki, K. (2005). Six-and-a-half-month-old children positively attribute goals to human action and to humanoid-robot motion. Cognitive Development, 20(2), 303–320. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogdev.2005.04.004
Muentener, P., & Carey, S. (2010). Infants’ causal representations of state change events. Cognitive Psychology, 61(2), 63–86. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogpsych.2010.02.001
Range, F., & Virányi, Z. (2015). Tracking the evolutionary origins of dog-human cooperation: the “Canine Cooperation Hypothesis”. Frontiers in Psychology, 5. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01582
Rees, G. (2008). Vision: The Evolution of Change Detection. Current Biology, 18(1). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2007.10.055
Stahl, A. E., & Feigenson, L. (2015). Observing the unexpected enhances infants’ learning and exploration. Science, 348(6230), 91–94. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaa3799