Infants' understanding of goals involving objects

As discussed in chapter 5, the proto-conversations infants engage in during the first three months of life involve sharing of affect but they do not involve communication about things external to the dyad. Consequently, many authors do not believe that infants are intentional beings, or that they perceive others as intentional.

In this chapter I will elaborate on what I began in chapter 5, namely that in terms of perceiving mental states, the triadic state is a continuation of the dyadic state, except that during the triadic state infants have acquired more complex cognitive structures that allow for more complex interactions involving objects.

The development of triadic social skills

When infants enter the triadic interaction state, they begin to alternate their gazes between people and objects. Monitoring people's facial expressions, their eyes, and the things they attend to is an important mechanism by which infants acquire complex social cognitive skills (Baldwin and Moses, 1994). Such monitoring solidifies infants' developing awareness of the relationship between person and object and deepens the infants' understanding of people as agents with intentions and goals, whose perspectives may differ from their own. For instance, infants begin actively to follow the gazes of others toward interesting events, monitor people's faces when in ambiguous situations, direct people's attention to interesting sights, and use others as social reference points (Baron-Cohen, 1993; Carpenter et al., 1998).