Awareness of mental states during the dyadic period

Infants (like most other mammals) are social creatures that spend the beginning of their lives in close proximity to their caretakers. Unlike other mammals, however, human infants have some special socio-cognitive capacities that make them particularly social and that differentiates them from other animals (Tomasello, 1999). That is, because infants not only come prepared with specific endogenous factors that allow them to distinguish their own species from inanimate objects, capacities which higher primates possess also (Tomasello and Call, 1997), but they are born with self-inferential mechanisms that allow them to perceive their own primitive mental states via the perception of emotions. This innate interpersonal awareness enables infants to recognize similar emotional/mental states in others. It is this very primitive awareness of the mental world that enables infants to perceive goal directedness and intentionality in human actions even in the first months of life. Thus it appears that infants exhibit a natural ability for “inter-subjectivity.” This ability is a precursor or proto-form of Theory of Mind knowledge.

In this chapter, I focus on these first months of life in order to describe those aspects of sociality that may reveal the infants' early awareness of mental life.