Guest Lecture of David Buttelmann

Guest Lecture of David Buttelmann

From the University of Erfurt

Date: 10 July 2013

Topic: Social Cognition in Infants - New Methods and Findings

Abstract:
In my talk I will describe recent research that is conducted by the research group “Kleinkindforschung in Thüringen” at the University of Erfurt. The set of studies will focus on the question of whether children before the age of four have a Theory of Mind (i.e. the attribution of mental states to others), and what factors influence infants’ and children’s social learning, such as the competence of a model or her group membership. Some of the studies are already published but the main body of my talk will include studies with preliminary (i.e., mainly complete but unpublished) results. Given the broad topics I will talk about a variety of methods used in the course of infant and toddler research, in particular the manipulation of participants’ object choice, imitation or their helping behavior as well as different variants of stimulus presentation (live vs. video).