Essay Example on The term theory of mind is inhabited by mental States

The following paragraphs describes few precursors to development of theory of mind observed in a 4 month old infant named Kyle These precursors were observed in a natural setting displayed by Kyle Infants communicate through different ways and patterns such as non verbal cues like cooing gurgles crying facial expressions body movements and many others The construct presented here is one of the earlier stages of communication babbling Babbling is a stage in which babies speak non recognizable words mostly from their own language in response to the sounds made by other people Gerken Zamuner 2004 It is the second stage in an infant s patterns of communication right after crying in newborns Infants between the ages of 3 6 months begin their phase of babbling It is the result of responding to the sounds made by other people The extract Kyle smiled and was responding with non verbal cues and then finally let out a small ah to indicate he was enjoying the game but didn't laugh out loud observation 2 lines 72 74 And extract he was also grizzling the whole time with aahh and ehh syllables observation 1 line 44 shows Kyle was responding to the communications and actions made by the mother by using non verbal cues and babbling speech This precursor was chosen on the basis that different patterns of communication in early stages of infancy such as Kyle s babbling of syllables leads to development in language acquisition which aids in the development of theory of mind Research has shown that interest in an infant to respond and interact socially with the parents and other social being minds helps them acquire and learn words and meanings This continuous engagement in communication enriches language development leading to greater understanding of perspectives in conversations 

By 9 months infants begin to share with another person the experience of attending to something Carpenter Nagell Tomasello 1998 and according to Tomasello 1995 come to understand that others intend for the infant to pay attention to a specific aspect of an object or event Around this age infants are also seen to follow the attention of adults by alternating their own gaze between adults and events or objects in the environment Moore Corkum 1998 Carpenter et al 1998 Under very simplified conditions infants as young as three months have also been shown to follow gaze Hood et al 1998 D Entremont et al 1997 Charman et al found that a measure of joint attention shifting gaze between an adult and an interesting toy at 20 months was positively correlated with theory of mind performance at 44 months Charman et al 2000 noted that there were substantial research showing connection between joint attention and theory of mind via language development However reported that direct relationship between joint attention and the development of theory of mind was needed to be further investigated