Where will the bear go? ManyBabies2 Theory of Mind replication study

The main objective is to provide insight into the type of expectations and predictions infants can make about social interactions. We will do this by probing whether babies can take into account others’ knowledge about a situation when predicting their actions.

We show them a short cartoon animation in which a bear chases a mouse that goes through a Y-shaped tunnel and ends up in one of two boxes. The bear also goes into the tunnel. Then, for a few seconds, the participant does not see where the bear comes out, leaving time for the baby to anticipate the bear’s location. By this we mean: do babies look to where the bear will come out of the tunnel, even before it appears? Sometimes the bear witnesses the mouse’s every move, other times the bear does not see in which box the mouse has gone into. We are interested in whether babies’ expectation differ between these cases.

Babies at this age do not speak too much yet, but their gaze patterns are very informative of what they are thinking. During the video, we record their eye movements, using an eyetracker, to observe where they are looking on the screen depending on what they expect will happen.

Example of a scenario with the recording of a baby's eye movements: Here the bear sees the mouse moving from one box to the other. The pink dot represents the baby's gaze and in the last thumbnail we see where he expect the bear to come out.

This multi-lab replication study will allow us to answer the question of whether babies expect others to act based on their knowledge and to better understand Theory of Mind in infancy. The study has just begun and we look forward to report the results in future newsletters.