Babies learn communicate at 10 months old.
Babies start to understand another person's thought process at 10 months providing new insights on how humans acquire knowledge and how communication develops, new research suggests.
"Understanding other people is a key factor in successful communication, and humans start to understand this at a very young age," said Yuyan Luo, associate professor of developmental psychology from the MU College of Arts and Science. "Our study indicates that infants, even before they can verbally communicate, can understand the thought processes of other people -- even if the thoughts diverge from what the infants know as truth, a term psychologists call false belief."
During the researches, infants were monitored during different trials of a common psychological test in which a doctor played a role of an actor at the given research, have preferred certain objects. Researchers analyzed the infant's gaze, because it is an indication of infant knowledge. The infants watched longer when the actor preferred to change the object.. The result was amazing; infants understood how the actor used them in a various ways. "When the actor did not witness the removal or addition of the preferred object, the infants seemed to use that information to interpret the person's actions," Luo said. "The infants appear to recognize that the actor's behavior comes from what the actor could see or could not see and hence what the actor thinks and this finding is consistent with similar false belief studies that involve older children."
Luo’s study is one of the first to break a stereotype about the false belief understanding in the first year of life; Results from other studies showed that infant understanding can exist at an earlier age. The research will be continued and Luo expects to find more studies about how people learn to communicate from the early ages. "In adults, beliefs guide behavior, but it would be difficult to explain another person's behavior without explaining his or her mental state," Luo said.
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