So babies are the consummate people persons – they love to watch others. People are the most interesting objects to babies not only because they look and move in a particular way in complex action sequences but because they interact with them. Synchrony is critically important to establishing social interactions and babies are on the lookout for those who are tuned into them. As adults, we instinctively engage in these synchronized activities, often mimicking the baby in an attempt to capture their affections. Two-month-old infants will even treat non-living objects that act contingently as if they are alive and smile at them.19 As they build up their models of what it is to be human, they are looking for evidence for those things that are most likely to be important for their survival and becoming increasingly more sophisticated in their decisions.
Thinking objects
Babies rely on faces, biological movement and contingent interaction to draw up a list of credentials that make something worth paying attention to. Any one of these attributes may signal that something is worth watching because they are starting to draw a distinction between the living and non-living world in terms of agency. Non-living things move because some force has acted upon them, whereas agents act independently for a purpose – they have goals. They have choices. When we understand that something has goals, we see it as intentional. We do this all the time with animals and our pets, when we give them human qualities using a cognitive bias called anthropomorphism, but we will even extend such ‘humanness’ to things that are clearly not alive, let alone possessed of minds.
Imagine three geometric shapes moving around a screen. A large triangle attacks a smaller triangle by banging into it and then corners a small circle inside a rectangular box. The circle moves around frantically inside the box as if trapped. The smaller triangle distracts the large triangle, allowing the circle to escape, and then closes the opening to the box, trapping the large triangle inside. The small triangle and circle rotate around each other in joy and then exit the screen. The large triangle proceeds to break up the box in a fit of rage. Hardly the script of a Hollywood blockbuster, but observers interpret this sequence as some sort of domestic dispute.20
This simple animation made by psychologists Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel in 1944 demonstrates that humans anthropomorphize moving shapes that appear to be goal directed and generate rich interpretations consistent with social relationships. The philosopher Dan Dennett thinks that we adopt an intentional stance as a strategy to first look out for things that could be agents that could have consequences for us and then give them intentions.21 When something has a face, moves as if alive or behaves in a purposeful way, we think that it has a mind that may have intentions directed towards us.
Attributing agency is something that babies also do from very early on. Based on the Heider and Simmel animation, infant psychologist Val Kuhlmeier showed infants a cartoon geometric red sphere, appearing to climb up a steep hill, that kept faltering and slipping down the slope.22 At one point, a green pyramid shape comes along and pushes the sphere up the slope until it reaches the top. To most of us, this seems to be a case where the pyramid has helped the sphere up the slope. In a second scene, the red sphere is again trying to climb up the hill but this time along comes a yellow cube that blocks the path and then pushes the sphere down the slope. The cube has hindered the sphere. Even though these are simple animations of geometric shapes, we readily see them as intentional agents. A sphere that wants to climb a hill, a pyramid that wants to help and a cube that wants to hinder.
Figure 3: Scene from Heider and Simmel 1944 animation
What is remarkable is that babies even as young as three months of age make exactly the same decisions about the different shapes.23 They look longer when a shape that has always helped suddenly starts hindering. Already at this age they are attributing good and bad personality characteristics to the shapes.
Are you thinking what I am thinking?
We not only judge others by their deeds but we also try to imagine what is going on in their minds. How do we know what others are thinking? One way is to ask them, but sometimes you cannot use language. On a recent trip to Japan, where I do not speak the language, I discovered just how much I took communication for granted. But before language, there had to be a more primitive form of communication that enabled humans to begin to understand each other. We had to know that we could share ideas, something that requires an awareness that others have minds and an understanding of what they might be thinking. The real quantum leap in the history of mankind that transformed our species was not initially language, but rather our ability to mind read.
Mind reading
I am going to surprise you with a little mind reading. Take a moment to look over the picture below, Georges de la Tour’s famous painting ‘The Cheat with the Ace of Diamonds’ (1635), until you have worked out what is going on.
In all likelihood, your eyes were instinctively drawn to the lady card player at the centre of the picture and, from there, you probably followed her line of gaze to the waitress and then to the faces of the two other players. Eventually you will have spotted the deception. The player on the left is cheating, as we can see that he is taking an ace from behind his back to change his hand into an ace flush of diamonds. He waits for his moment when the other players are not paying attention to him.
How did I know where you would look? Did I read your mind? I did not need to. To fully understand de la Tour’s painting, you have to read the faces and the eyes to work out what is going on in the minds of the players. Studies of the eye movements of adults looking at pictures of individuals in social settings reveal a very consistent and predictable path of scrutiny that speaks volumes about the nature of human interactions.24 Humans seek out meaning in social settings by reading others, whereas another animal wandering through the Louvre Museum in Paris where de la Tour’s masterpiece hangs would probably pay little attention to the painting let alone scrutinize the faces for meaning.
Figure 4: ‘The Cheat with the Ace of Diamonds’ by Georges de la Tour (1635)
How do we begin to mind read? We start with the face. Initially we pay attention to the lady at the centre because the face is one of the most important patterns for humans. As adults, we tend to see faces everywhere – in the clouds, on the moon, on the front of VW Beetles. Any pattern with two dots for eyes that has the potential to look like a face is immediately seen as one. It may be a legacy of an adaptive strategy to look out for faces wherever they might be just in case there is a potential enemy hidden in the bushes, or it may simply be that because humans spend so much time looking at faces, we see them everywhere.25