Henrike Moll: USC

Humans are an extraordinarily social species. Their unique way of relating to one another becomes evident very early in ontogeny. In this talk, I will present two lines of experiments, both of which exemplify toddlers’ attunement to other persons and their awareness of others’ perceptual and epistemic states. In one line of experiments, we found that toddlers negate another person’s visibility when her eyes are occluded. Toddlers’ willingness to deny the other’s visibility was positively correlated with their knowledge of the pronoun ‘each other’—suggesting that children who reliably distinguish between reciprocal and individual acts are particularly demanding of reciprocity. In the second line of experiments, we approached the problem of false belief understanding in a novel way by assessing children’s facial expressions. We found that by the age of 2.5 years, toddlers affectively express suspense when observing how an agent acts on misguided assumptions. Both lines of experiments demonstrate impressive social motivational and social cognitive facts: Toddlers demand reciprocal perception in face-to-face encounters, and they are touched and moved when others actions are misguided. The results will be interpreted with a theoretical framework that is inspired by Vygotsky.