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Knowing Others in the First Year of Life

A newborn fixates on the parent’s face. In a matter of weeks, the young baby will smile in response to the parent. Within the first year, most babies will actively redirect their parents’ attention to an object of their own interest, and before parents have time to put the baby pictures away in an album, young toddlers will begin to read their parents’ minds, forging the link between adult mental states and the actions they generate. How do infants move from an initial attraction to other people to an eventual understanding of them? In particular, what predispositions, knowledge, and skills are available to infants in the first year of life to ready them for the development of a theory of mind – that is, an understanding that people are motivated by internal, psychological states? These questions are central among those addressed by Maria Legerstee in her book, Infants’ Sense of People: Precursors to a Theory of Mind. Drawing primarily on a large body of her own research, Legerstee challenges the notion that infants’ initial perception of people is based on behavioral features (such as selfpropelled movement), and argues instead that infants’ earliest understanding of people is based on a conceptual distinction between people and other objects. Infants, in Legerstee’s view, are innately predisposed to both identify and identify with others. Extensive research has demonstrated that, from birth, infants preferentially respond to human faces and voices, distinguishing these social stimuli from other visual and auditory input [faces: e.g., Goren, Sarty, & Wu, 1975; voices: e.g., DeCasper & Fifer, 1980]. Questions do arise, however, with respect to what these early preferences reveal about infants’ understanding of others. Do infants distinguish people from objects on the basis of perceptual features at the start, only later to develop a conceptual distinction between social and nonsocial stimuli? Or are infants born