Geänderte Inhalte

How does perspective-taking develop over the lifespan? This question has been investigated in two separate research traditions, dealing with theory of mind (ToM) and wisdom, respectively. Operating in almost complete isolation from each other, and using rather different conceptual approaches, these two traditions have produced seemingly contradictory results: While perspective-taking has been consistently found to decline in old age in ToM research, studies on wisdom have mostly found that perspective-taking remains constant or sometimes even increases in later adulthood. This study sought to integrate these two lines of research and clarify the seemingly contradictory patterns of findings by systematically testing for both forms of perspective-taking and their potential cognitive foundations. The results revealed (1) the dissociation in developmental patterns between ToM perspective-taking (declining with age) and wisdom-related perspectivetaking (no decline with age) also held – documented here for the first time – in one and the same sample of younger versus older adults; (2) this dissociation was of limited generality: It did not (or only partly) hold once the material of the two types of tasks was more closely matched; and (3) the divergent developmental patterns of ToM perspective-taking versus wisdom-related perspective-taking could be accounted for to some degree by the fact that only TOM perspective-taking was related to developmental changes in fluid intelligence.

The commentary by Baillargeon, Buttelmann and Southgate raises a number of crucial issues concerning the replicability and validity of measures of false belief in infancy. Although we agree with some of their arguments, we believe that they underestimate the replication crisis in this area. In our response to their commentary, we first analyze the current empirical situation. The upshot is that, given the available evidence, it remains very much an open question whether infants possess a rich theory of mind. We then draw out more general conclusions for future collaborative studies that have the potential to address this open question.

Human infants, apes and capuchin monkeys engage in intuitive statistics: they generate predictions from populations of objects to samples based on proportional information. This suggests that statistical reasoning might depend on some core knowledge that humans share with other primate species. To aid the reconstruction of the evolution of this capacity, we investigated whether intuitive statistical reasoning is also present in a species of Old World monkey. In a series of four experiments, 11 longtailed macaques were offered different pairs of populations containing varying proportions of preferred versus neutral food items. One population always contained a higher proportion of preferred items than the other. An experimenter simultaneously drew one item out of each population, hid them in her fists and presented them to the monkeys to choose. Although some individuals performed well across most experiments, our results imply that long-tailed macaques as a group did not make statistical inferences from populations of food items to samples but rather relied on heuristics. These findings suggest that there may have been convergent evolution of this ability in New World monkeys and apes (including humans).