Developmental Science 7:3 (2004), pp 283 –288 © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. Blackwell Publishing Ltd REPORT Social attention and preschool social cognition Infant social attention predicts preschool social cognition Henry M. Wellman, 1 Ann T. Phillips, 2 Sarah Dunphy-Lelii 3 and Nicole LaLonde 3 1. Center for Human Growth and Development, and Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, USA 2. Mt. Sania Hospital, New York, USA 3. Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, USA Abstract Recent research examining infants’ understanding of intentional action claims to be studying the early origins or precursors of children’s later theories of mind. If these infant understandings are continuous with later preschool achievements, there should be empirical connections between the two. We provide initial evidence that infants’ social attention predicts later social cognition. Specifically, 14-month-olds’ habituation to human intentional action significantly predicts later preschool mentalistic construal of persons, as measured on a Theory of Mind Scale. Introduction Adults largely understand people in intentional, mentalistic terms. They see people as having intentional mental states – e.g. beliefs about the world, desires for things – and they construe actions as intended – directed toward desired goals. Over the past 10 years researchers have traced the beginnings of this intentional understanding to pre- schoolers and toddlers and, perhaps, even to its beginnings in infancy. Preschoolers share with adults an intentional, mentalistic construal, or ‘theory of mind’ (Flavell & Miller, 1998; Wellman & Gelman, 1998) in that they employ a variety of mental-state constructs to reason about persons’ actions, their beliefs, desires, false beliefs, intentions (e.g. Gopnik & Slaughter, 1991); they conversationally des- cribe and explain human behavior in terms of what the person ‘wants’, ‘thinks’ and ‘knows’ (e.g. Dunn, 1995); they distinguish intended voluntary actions from unin- tended biological or physical movements such as a per- son shaking with fever or being blown down by the wind (e.g. Inagaki & Hatano, 1993; Schult & Wellman, 1997). Even toddlers understand emotions and desires as internal and subjective (e.g. Repacholi & Gopnik, 1997; Bartsch & Wellman, 1995) and understand action and speech as guided by the person’s intentions (Meltzoff, 1995; Carpenter, Aktar & Tomasello, 1998). What are the origins of this preschool theory of mind in infancy? Infant understanding of persons is a classic issue, one tackled in traditional research using such methods as still-face, social referencing, and joint atten- tion paradigms. For example, around 9 to 14 months infants begin to show success at following others’ visual gaze (Butterworth, 1991; Scaife & Bruner, 1975), act positively versus hesitantly toward objects depending on the emotion displayed by someone else (Feinman, 1982; Sorce, Emde, Campos & Klinert 1985), and even earlier in life become upset when people do not behave actively and contingently (Muir & Haines, 1993). These social accomplishments clearly demonstrate that other people influence the infant in increasingly complex ways. It is unclear, however, what these accomplishments require in terms of an understanding of the other person (see reviews by Baldwin & Moses, 1996; Moore & Corkum, 1994). To help address these ambiguities, in the last several years investigators have turned to preferential looking methods to further examine infants’ understanding of persons and their emotions and actions. For example, Phillips, Wellman and Spelke (2002) examined whether and when infants understand that a person looking pos- itively at an object is likely to want it and so reach for it. In this research infants saw a person look at one of two objects with an expression of interest and joy. After familiarization to multiple trials of such a display infants saw two test events. In the consistent test event the actor first looked positively at one of the two objects and then went on to hold that same object (consistent with an Address for correspondence: Henry Wellman, Center for Human Growth and Development, University of Michigan, 300 N. Ingalls, 10th Floor, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-0406, USA; e-mail: hmw@umich.edu