ABSTRACT
One of the most challenging theoretical tasks for developmental psychology is to characterise the transition between an infant’s modes of communicating with other people in the first year of life, and the emergence of a young child’s increasingly sophisticated concepts of mind over the ensuing three or four years. In this chapter I shall offer an account that begins with the infant’s abilities to perceive certain forms of “attitude” in the behaviour of other people, and ends with the young child’s insight into the nature of intentional mental states. I shall be emphasising not only the special qualities of personal relatedness and interpersonal engagement that make this progression possible, but also the significance of a one-year-old’s ability to perceive the directness of another person’s attitudes towards a visually specified world. I shall argue that the child’s capacity to disembed from his or her own perspective vis-à-vis the world, and to engage in creative symbolic play, are important stepping-stones along this social-development pathway.
