An initial but receding altercentric bias in preverbal infants' memory

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.