It has long been held that young children are egocentric, a position usually attributed to Piaget. The theory that we sought to test with the ERC project turned this long-held assumption on its head, proposing instead that human infants are altercentric and preferentially attend to the behaviour of other people. We further hypothesized that this is possible because young infants do not yet have a sense of self, which would otherwise compete for their attention. Without a developed self-representation, infants' attention is externally-oriented which we think enables them to learn better all the things that a young baby has to learn. At the end of the project, we have found considerable evidence in support of this idea. Three major findings are: 1) at 8 months, infants remember better the location of an object who's hiding was witnessed by another agent than the location of an object that the infant has witnessed alone (we call this an altercentric bias in memory); 2) this memory bias is receding by 12 months, but has not completely disappeared; but at 18 months, those infants with a less developed sense of self show a memory bias for objects associated with others whereas those infants who have a more developed sense of self show a memory bias for objects associated with themselves; and 3) the emergence of self-representation at 18 months brings with it an experience of perspective conflict: now infants have 2 perspectives (self and other) and these compete and cause conflict when they diverge. At the end of the project, we have accumulated over 10 large data sets, each of which contribute to testing the theory proposed in the ERC project.
