ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on one representative of the Nativist mindreading camp: the ‘Infant Mindreading Hypothesis’. Some of the most important data for the Infant Mindreading Hypothesis are infants’ looking behaviours in spontaneous response false belief tasks. The Infant Mindreading Hypothesis is a very specific type of Nativist mindreading account. The innately specified mindreading concepts are likely to be very simple in contrast to a mature understanding of the concept of belief. Poverty of the stimulus arguments are most closely associated with Noam Chomsky’s work on language acquisition, but their structure works just as well for mindreading abilities. The child must therefore suppress his usual reality-based response to the experimenter’s question, and requires cognitive resources beyond the mindreading system which are not yet fully developed in the three-year-old. The association that the child makes between making her bed and parental praise is learned from experience.
