Watch the Eyes says Wendy

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Congratulations to Wendy Clements, an Experimental Psychology Lecturer in BIOLS, who reached the final in the Daily Telegraph/ BASF Young Science Writer Awards 1998, with an article about the way in which young children develop the ability to guess what is going on in other people's minds.

Interactions with other people depend a great deal on this sort of guessing game. Our guesses can be wrong, but 'mental gambling' is essential if we are to understand why someone behaves in a particular way and predict how he or she might behave in the future. Children below the age of four years find this very difficult, particularly when they have to guess about a situation in which a person believes something which the child knows not to be the case.

To investigate this, Wendy makes use of a character called Sam the mouse. Sam puts some cheese in a red box and then goes down the mousehole to sleep. While he snoozes, Katie mouse arrives, takes the cheese and puts it into another box, coloured blue. Sam returns, 'believing' that the cheese is still in the red box although we know that it is now in the blue box. Where should Sam look? Three year old children are likely to ignore Sam's belief and to say that he will look in the blue box where they know the cheese is. Nevertheless, monitoring eye movements shows that these same children look at the red box, as if they expect him to look there.

Their eye movements seem to reflect an earlier unconscious sensitivity to what goes on in the mind of others, which does not depend on language for its development. This may have implications for the development of remedial programmes for children with autism, a debilitating disorder which affects 10-14 children in 10,000. It is possible that, despite their difficulty in predicting the behaviour of others verbally, some children with autism nevertheless show the sensitivity expressed in anticipatory looking. These children may be more likely to benefit from programmes designed to teach the principles of this guessing game.

As a general principle, says Wendy, mind reading is gambling and it is important to watch the eyes.