Velisar Manea defends his PhD thesis

Velisar Manea

Title

'Testing the Infant Altercentrism Hypothesis'.

Time and place

24 February 2023 at 1 pm (CET).

The defence will take place in Auditorium 1.1.18 at The Faculty of Social Sciences (CSS), Øster Farimagsgade 5, 1353 Copenhagen.

Assessment committee

  • Professor Søren Kyllingsbæk, Department of Psychology, University of Copenhagen (chair)

  • Professor Stephen Butterfill, Department of Philosophy, University of Warwick, United Kingdom

  • Senior researcher Paula Rubio-Fernandez, Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas, University of Oslo, Norway

Supervisor

  • Professor Victoria Southgate, Department of Psychology, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Abstract

In a theoretical paper, Southgate (2020) proposed a polar opposite view to Piaget’s for infant early cognition. Instead of early egocentrism, infants are proposed to start life with a strong altercentric bias.
Whereas later in life egocentrism is overcome by sophisticated feats of social cognition such as a theory of mind, early altercentrism is proposed to be mostly a reliance on others' visual perspective. The function is information selection and preferential encoding. Nonetheless, many of the puzzling results of the past decades of research on infant theory of mind can be explained by the relatively simple altercentric bias.
The work I will present is a series of direct tests of the altercentric hypothesis. The theoretical parts explore possible mechanistic implementations that satisfy two ideas of Southgate’s proposal: (i) that altercentrism in infants serves an ‘important learning function’ and (ii) that which is learned from the others’ perspective may or may not be attributed to these others.