I don't know why you're being downvoted, it's pretty much documented. I think it's at around 6 months when they start being able to connect the dots... barely :-)

Deception doesn’t require consciousness or reasoning. I feel like there are many different personal definitions for manipulation here and people are just disagreeing indirectly on that.

Deception and manipulation are much different things. In any cases, babies lack the ability to lie or pretend.

You really need to stretch definitions to absurd to get near to deception too. They cry cause discomfort and really have no idea how you will react or what you will think f about that.

Babies are dumb and simple biological mechanisms from this point of view.