Infant inferences from gaze direction support emerging concepts of persons
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Across cultures, humans reason about others’ mental states as being either phenomenal, reflecting shareable experiences, or intentional, reflecting agentive goals. Might our dissociated judgments of others’ mental states be linked to dissociated judgments of others’ gaze direction, one of our earliest social cues from infancy? We presented adults (N = 600) and 6- to 8-year-old children (N = 200) with brief descriptions of either phenomenal or intentional mental states and asked them to choose whether a face with averted or direct gaze better matched the character in each description. Adults and older children chose the averted-gaze face for the phenomenality descriptions but the direct-gaze face for the intentionality descriptions. Humans’ dissociated use of gaze from infancy may thus persist into adulthood and impact our emerging concepts of others as social agents, i.e., persons.
