ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2023
An initial but receding altercentric bias in preverbal infants' memory.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- Beliefs about accuracy shape confidence attributions to humans and artificial agents.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- Altercentric Memory Error at 9 Months But Correct Object Memory by 18 Months Revealed in Infants' Pupil.Developmental science · 2025Article
- Postnatal dependency as the foundation of social learning in humans.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Infants evaluate informativeness of evidence and predict causal events as revealed in theta oscillations and predictive looking.Communications psychology · 2024Article
- An initial but receding altercentric bias in preverbal infants' memory.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Emerging Self-Representation Presents a Challenge When Perspectives Conflict.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Young learners would seem to face a daunting challenge in selecting to what they should attend, a problem that may have been exacerbated in human infants by changes in carrying practices during human evolution. A novel theory proposes that human infant cognition has an altercentric bias whereby early in life, infants prioritize encoding events that are the targets of others' attention. We tested for this bias by asking whether, when the infant and an observing agent have a conflicting perspective on an object's location, the co-witnessed location is better remembered. We found that 8- but not 12-month-olds expected the object to be at the location where the agent had seen it. These findings suggest that in the first year of life, infants may prioritize the encoding of events to which others attend, even though it may sometimes result in memory errors. However, the disappearance of this bias by 12 months suggests that altercentricism is a feature of very early cognition. We propose that it facilitates learning at a unique stage in the life history when motoric immaturity limits infants' interaction with the environment; at this stage, observing others could maximally leverage the information selection process.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.