Periodic Reporting for period 3 - DEVOMIND (How do infants mentalize? Bringing a neuroimaging approach to the puzzle of early mindreading.) Reporting period: 2021-02-01 to 2022-07-31 Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project The project addresses how and when human infants can take others' perspectives. The project is grounded in the assumption that early human cognition evolved to meet the unique challenges of the infancy period, which include the need to acquire a vast amount of information through observation. The project tests a novel theory of early perspective taking which claims that a) human infants have a bias to track what other people are attending to and b) they can do this without interference from their own perspective because self-representation emerges slowly in the first years of life. The project will describe the typical development of these abilities with the expectation that such an understanding of typical trajectories will inform our understanding of atypical development. In particular, developmental disorders of social cognition (most notably, Autism Spectrum Disorder) are characterized by atypicalities in attention to social input. If, as the theory being tested proposes, human infants do indeed have a bias to encode the targets of others' attention, this has important implications for atypical development. The primary objectives of the project are to test the proposed theory, and to accumulate data which will allow us to evaluate the theory. Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far Several months at the beginning of the project were spent building our lab (the Centre for Early Childhood Cognition) at the University of Copenhagen (https://psychology.ku.dk/research/research_groups/cognition-and-clinical-neuropsychology/ecc-en/). We built the lab from scratch, including purchasing important equipment (EEG, fNIRS, eye-tracking) and set up and installation. We also spent significant time recruiting participants from the Danish national registry, and now have a database of over 2000 infants. We have tested many children both in our lab and in a public science museum in Copenhagen. We are close to completion of at least one of the ongoing studies. We have also spent time ensuring that our studies comply with Open Science principles and all of our studies have been preregistered at the Open Science Framework (OSF). In addition, the PI has worked a lot on developing the theory that is being tested, and expanding the predictions that can be made. This has resulted in a theoretical paper, which is currently undergoing a final round of revisions. Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far) As the theory being tested is highly novel, all of the studies that we run to test this theory go beyond the state of the art. We are employing a range of different measures to put this theory to the test, and are working on the integration of some methodologies (e.g. EEG and eye-tracking) so that we can further expand what we can do. Theoretical work by the PI has generated new predictions of the current theory, including a proposed relationship between Oxytocin levels and perspective-taking in infancy. It is hoped that in being able to measure this relationship, it will provide an additional way of testing the theory. The project still has 3.5 years to go, and we are very hopeful that the results of the project will go significantly beyond the current state of the art. The second post-doc has recently been hired, completing the originally proposed team composition and with the lab now set up and recruitment strategies implemented, the majority of the rest of the project will be focused on collection and analysis of data.
