Media release

From: The Royal Society

An initial but receding altercentric bias in preverbal human infants’ memory

Human infants have long been characterized as egocentric, a term explicitly used by Piaget to describe early cognition. The studies we report shows that the opposite may be true – that initially, human cognition is altercentric and biased towards encoding and remembering the targets of other people’s attention. We show that under particular circumstances, infants misremember events as others experienced them. We propose that this altercentric bias is a unique feature of very early development, when infants’ ability to explore the world by themselves is limited, facilitating learning by allowing them to explore the world through the attention of others. Contact: - Velisar Manea, University of Copenhagen, vem@psy.ku.dk Telephone: 004560906603 Twitter: @vhsouthgate 

Alter ego – Once thought to be inherently self-obsessed, infants may actually be ‘altercentric’. It is believed young learners experience difficulty in overcoming one’s own perspective – ‘egocentric’. In a memory task, researchers found eight- but not 12-month-old infants misremember an object’s location if others experienced them differently. Infants may filter the world through the eyes of more knowledgeable others, the authors said. Proceedings of the Royal Society B.