"Mind Reading" Babies Discovered - Study

Never mind Babies with Super-Strength, mind reading babies have been discovered in Italy - and they are likely all around the world.

...but what IS mind reading (there is always a catch, isn't there)?  Might empathy be a form of mind reading?  What about basic expectations of an individual, taking into consideration their previous actions?  Italian psychologist Luca Surian and her team at Trento, Italy set forth to find out whether babies have this ability at the tender age of 13 months (Attribution of Beliefs by 13-Month-Old Infants (2007), Psychological Science (18): 570).

An inherent property of the human mind is the ability to project certain mental states to a scenario as it unravels.  For example, you see a a priest and a rabbi walk into a bar and immediately think, "What a pair of practical jokers!" and you'd likely be right.

The age in which the ability to "mind read", as the case may be, is unknown and according to Lucia has been under contention for some time, "...what is at stake here is a remarkable revision not only of the developmental time course of mind-reading skills, but also of the role of different developmental mechanisms that have been proposed to be responsible for this fundamental aspect of human cognition."

Surian's group designed an experiment using animated caterpillars - caterpillars were given a piece of food behind a screen, either some cheese or an apple to munch into - with or without a human hand to cue a specific food type.  The team discovered when a human hand was present, and the little animated caterpillar went to the opposite food source, the babies 'looking time' increased significantly - almost 3 fold.

"This result supports the view that infants possess an...ability that permits them to attribute beliefs to agents." said the authors.  In plain english, babies are capable of believing what a person, or 'agent', might do in advance - i.e. they are attributing a particular "mental state" to the 'agent'.

So, next time you're baby sitting your sibling's or friend's kid, remember they are analyzing your every move, trying to get inside your head, and attempting to figure out what you're doing and why you're doing it.  

If they stare at you confusingly, they're trying to read your mind, albeit unsuccessfully.