Describe factors that contribute to the development of theory of mind during the first three years of life

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Over the first year of life, infants build an implicit appreciation of people as animate beings whose behavior is governed by intentions, desires, and feelings. This sets the stage for the verbalized mental understandings that blossom in early childhood.
Three-month-olds smile more at people than at objects and become upset when a person poses a still face and fails to communicate. By 6 months, when infants see people talk, they expect the talk to be directed at other people, not at inanimate objects. At the end of the first year, babies view people as intentional beings who can share and influence one another's mental states, a milestone that opens the door to new forms of communication—joint attention, social referencing, preverbal gestures, and language. These early milestones serve as the foundation for later mental understandings. At the end of the second and continuing over the third year, children display a clearer grasp of people's emotions and desires, evident in their increasing mental-state vocabulary, capacity to empathize, and realization that people often differ from one another and from themselves in likes, dislikes, wants, needs, and wishes.
But although 2- to 3-year-olds have started to integrate mental states, their understanding is limited to a simplistic desire theory of mind: They think that people always act in ways consistent with their desires and do not understand that less obvious, more interpretive mental states, such as beliefs, also affect behavior.