Infants' Sense of People Precursors to a Theory of Mind [Paperback]

This book presents an accessible introduction to the very earliest development of our understanding of other people.Infants' Sense of People focusses on infants during their first year of life, exploring how they begin to think about other people, their feelings, emotions and intentions, and how they become aware of these aspects of their own development. Drawing on a broad range of research and developmental theory, Maria Legerstee argues persuasively that before infants learn to speak, interactions with others are possible because infants have a primitive pre-linguistic 'theory of mind'.Infants' Sense of People focusses on infants during their first year of life, exploring how they begin to think about other people, their feelings, emotions and intentions, and how they become aware of these aspects of their own development. Drawing on a broad range of research and developmental theory, Maria Legerstee argues persuasively that before infants learn to speak, interactions with others are possible because infants have a primitive pre-linguistic 'theory of mind'.Drawing on a broad range of research and developmental theory and focusing on infants during their first year of life, Maria Legerstee asserts that they have an innate sense of people at birth, which is activated through sympathetic emotions. She questions the idea that infants use physical parameters such as contingencies or motion to distinguish people from objects, and rejects the assumption that infants are mechanical creatures before they become psychological ones. She argues persuasively that before infants learn to speak, interactions with others are possible because infants have a primitive pre-linguistic 'theory of mind'.Preface; Introduction; 1. Definitions, theories and plan of the book; 2. Endogenous and exogenous influences in development; 3. Animate/inanimate distinction; 4. Self and consciousness; 5. Dyadic interactions; 6. Triadic interactions - joint engagement in 5 and 7 month-olds; 7. Sociall(