Young children's attribution of action to beliefs and desires

When and how children understand beliefs and desires is central to whether they are ever childhood realists and when they evidence a theory of mind. Adults typically construe human action as resulting from an actor's beliefs and desires, a mentalistic interpretation that represents a common and fundamental form of psychological explanation. We investigated children's ability to do likewise. In Experiment 1, 60 subjects were asked to explain why story characters performed simple actions, such as looking under a piano for a kitten. Both preschoolers and adults gave predominantly psychological explanations, attributing the actions to the actor's beliefs and desires. Even 3-year-olds attributed actions to beliefs and false beliefs, demonstrating an understanding of belief not evident in previous research. In Experiment 2, 24 3-year-olds were tested further on their understanding of false belief. They were given both false belief prediction and explanation tasks. Children performed well on explanation taks, attributing an anomalous action to the actor's false belief, even when they failed to predict correctly what action would follow from a false belief. We concluded that 3-year-olds and adults share a fundamentally similar construal of human action in terms of beliefs and desires, even false beliefs.     

The Role of Strategic Planning in Accessing False-Belief Understanding

Recently, Chandler and Hala found that actively involving 3-year-olds in planning a deception facilitated performance on false-belief questions. The methodology used, however, provided no basis for determining whether the good performance of these young subjects was the result of the deceptive intent of their planning efforts, or whether other sorts of planning would have been equally effective. The research reported here systematically varied both ( a ) subjects' responsibility for planning where to relocate an object and ( b ) whether the goal behind this relocation was a deceptive one. The present research demonstrated, first, when subjects simply watched the transfer take place, it made no difference whether the object was moved for deceptive or some more practical reason. In contrast, those subjects who had themselves strategically planned a deception were markedly better at answering questions about another's false beliefs than those who simply witnessed the transfer taking place. No comparable facilitating effect was found when subjects planned a transfer but without deceptive intent. We argue that strategic planning works to underscore the importance of the belief states of others and provide opportunities not afforded by "standard" unexpected change or transfer tasks for showcasing 3-year-olds' emerging understanding of the possibility of false belief.     

Children's developing knowledge of the relationship between mental awareness and pretense

This study investigated 3- and 4-year-old's understanding of the relationship between pretense and mental awareness. In Experiments 1 and 2, only a subset of 4-year-olds recognized that sleeping characters and characters ignorant of their appearance were not pretending. However, these experiments had certain linguistic demands, which potentially influenced performance. In Experiments 3, these demand characteristics were reduced; under these circumstances, 3- and 4-year-olds recognized that pretenders were aware of their actions or appearance. However, Experiment 4 showed that even using this modified procedure, 3- and 4-year-olds do not completely understand the relationship between pretense and awareness. These data support the hypotheses that by the age of 4, children have some, but not a complete, understanding of the relationship between pretense and mental awareness.     

A Comparison of Young Children's Understanding of Contradictory Representations in Pretense, Memory, and Belief

The present study examined the nature of young children's understanding of various mental representations. 3- and 4-year-olds were presented with story protagonists who held mental representations (beliefs, pretenses, and memories) that contradicted reality. Subjects chose 1 of 2 alternate " thought pictures " (depicting either the mental representation or reality) that reflected the mental state. While 4-year-olds performed relatively well on all scenario types, 3-year-olds chose the correct thought picture significantly more often for pretense and memory scenarios than for false belief scenarios. These results suggest that young children conceptualize pretense as involving mental representations, and that they have more difficulty understanding contradictory mental representations that purport to correspond to reality.     

Executive functioning and preschoolers' understanding of false beliefs, false photographs, and false signs

Two studies were conducted to investigate the specificity of the relationship between preschoolers' emerging executive functioning skills and false belief understanding. Study 1 ( N =44) showed that 3- to 5-year-olds' performance on an executive functioning task that required selective suppression of actions predicted performance on false belief tasks, but not on false photograph tasks. Study 2 ( N =54) replicated the finding from Study 1 and showed that performance on the executive functioning task also predicted 3- to 5-year-olds' performance on false sign tasks. These findings show that executive functioning is required to reason only about representations that are intended to reflect a true state of affairs. Results are discussed with respect to theories of preschoolers' theory-of-mind development.     

Where is the real cheese? Young children's ability to discriminate between real and pretend Acts

This study examined 2- to 3-year-olds' ability to make a pretend-real distinction in the absence of content cues. Children watched two actors side by side. One was really eating, and the other was pretending to eat, but in neither case was information about content available. Following the displays, children were asked to retrieve the real food (Experiment 1) or point to the container with the real food (Experiments 2 and 3). 3- and 2.5-year-olds distinguished between the real and pretend acts based on behavioral cues alone. Two-year-olds chose the containers at random, but their spontaneous reactions suggested that they discriminated the real acts from pretense to some degree. Possible accounts for the discrepancy between the different behavioral measures are discussed.     

Children's Undrstanding of Epistemic Conduct in Self-Deception and Other False Belief Stories

In self-deception persons accept false belief through a motivated disregard for countervailing evidence. Such epistemic misconduct renders them responsisble for their own deception. It was hypothesized that children's understanding of this responsibility would be associated with an understanding of how evidence informs belief. In the study 4- to 9-year-old children's understanding of the relations between false belief, evidence, and epistemic responsibility was examined using stories involving self-deception, lying, and misleading appearances. Results indicated that younger children who understood false belief understood simpler types of deception, but that understanding self-deceivers' epistmic responsibility was limited to older children who understood the relevance of evidence to belief formation.     

Almost thinking counterfactually: children's understanding of close counterfactuals

Saying something "almost happened" indicates that one is considering a close counterfactual world. Previous evidence suggested that children start to consider these close counterfactuals at around 2 years of age (P. L. Harris, 1997), substantially earlier than they pass other tests of counterfactual thinking. However, this success appears to result from false positives. In Experiment 1 (N = 41), 3- and 4-year-olds could identify a character who almost completed an action when the comparison did not complete it. However, in Experiments 1 and 2 (N = 98), children performed poorly when the comparison character completed the action. In Experiment 3 (N = 28), 5- and 6-year-olds consistently passed the task, indicating that they made appropriate counterfactual interpretations of the "almost" statements. This understanding of close counterfactuals proved more difficult than standard counterfactuals.     

Compositionality and statistics in adjective acquisition: 4-year-olds interpret tall and short based on the size distributions of novel noun referents

Four experiments investigated 4-year-olds' understanding of adjective-noun compositionality and their sensitivity to statistics when interpreting scalar adjectives. In Experiments 1 and 2, children selected tall and short items from 9 novel objects called pimwits (1-9 in. in height) or from this array plus 4 taller or shorter distractor objects of the same kind. Changing the height distributions of the sets shifted children's tall and short judgments. However, when distractors differed in name and surface features from targets, in Experiment 3, judgments did not shift. In Experiment 4, dissimilar distractors did affect judgments when they received the same name as targets. It is concluded that 4-year-olds deploy a compositional semantics that is sensitive to statistics and mediated by linguistic labels.     

Young Children's Understanding of "Remember" and "Forget"

3 studies examined young children's understanding that if one "remembers" or "forgot," one must have known at a prior time. In Study 1,4-year-olds but not 3-year-olds understood the prior knowledge component of "forgot"; both groups understood that a character with prior knowledge was "gonna remember." Study 2 controlled for the possibility that good performance on "remember" might be due to a simple association of remembering with knowledge. A significant number of 4-year-olds but not 3-year-olds understood that when 2 characters currently knew, the one with prior knowledge remembered, and that when neither character currently knew, the one with prior knowledge forgot. Study 3 made prior knowledge more salient by making the remembered or forgotten item visible to the subjects throughout. 4-year-olds performed near ceiling on both verbs, whereas 3-year-olds' performance did not differ from chance. The results are discussed in relation to children's developing understanding of the mind.     

Sources of inflexibility in 6-year-olds' understanding of emotion in speech

When utterances contain conflicting emotion cues, 6-year-olds judge emotion from content, even when instructed to judge emotion from paralanguage (Morton & Trehub, 2001). Two experiments examined the nature of this bias. In Experiment 1, priming paralanguage reversed 6-year-olds' normal bias to content. In Experiment 2, 6-year-olds were instructed to listen to paralanguage under various conditions. Children were more likely to follow instructions delivered with feedback than instructions delivered alone. Children who described conflicts between content and paralanguage were more likely to follow instructions than children who did not describe these conflicts. Results suggest that 6-year-olds can judge emotion from paralanguage in the presence of competing content but often remain focused on content because of the way they represent the instructions.     

Early Deception and the Child's Theory of Mind: False Trails and Genuine Markers

The ability to understand false beliefs is critical to a concept of mind. Chandler, Fritz, and Hala challenge recent claims that this ability emerges only at around 4 years of age. They report that 2- and 3-year-olds remove true trails and lay false ones to mislead someone about the location of a hidden object. Experiment 1 confirmed that 2- and 3-year-olds produce apparently deceptive ploys, but they produce them less often than 4-year-olds, require prompting, and rarely anticipate their impact on the victim's beliefs or search. In addition, Experiment 2 showed that 3-year-olds produce deceptive and informative ploys indiscriminately, whether asked to mislead a competitor or inform a collaborator. By contrast, 4-year-olds act selectively. The results support earlier claims that an understanding of false beliefs and deceptive ploys emerges at around 4 years of age. 2- and 3-year-olds can be led to produce such ploys but show no clear understanding of their effect.     

Taking decisions seriously: young children's understanding of conventional truth

Research suggests that young children may see a direct and one-way connection between facts about the world and epistemic mental states (e.g., belief). Conventions represent instances of active constructions of the mind that change facts about the world. As such, a mature understanding of convention would seem to present a strong challenge to children's simplified notions of epistemic relations. Three experiments assessed young children's abilities to track behavioral, representational, and truth aspects of conventions. In Experiment 1, 3- and 4-year-old children (N = 30) recognized that conventional stipulations would change people's behaviors. However, participants generally failed to understand how stipulations might affect representations. In Experiment 2, 3-, 5-, and 7-year-old children (N = 53) were asked to reason about the truth values of statements about pretenses and conventions. The two younger groups of children often confused the two types of states, whereas older children consistently judged that conventions, but not pretenses, changed reality. In Experiment 3, the same 3- and 5-year-olds (N = 42) participated in tasks assessing their understanding of representational diversity (e.g., false belief). In general, children's performance on false-belief and "false-convention" tasks did not differ, which suggests that conventions were understood as involving truth claims (as akin to beliefs about physical reality). Children's difficulties with the idea of conventional truth seems consistent with current accounts of developing theories of mind.     

Preschoolers' Attributions of Mental States in Pretense

When young children appear to recognize that someone else is engaging in make-believe play, do they infer what the pretender is thinking? Are they aware that the pretender is thinking about a pretend scenario yet knows what the real situation is? Preschoolers ages 3–5 ( N = 45) viewed scenes from the Barney & Friends television series depicting either make-believe or realistic actions. Children were questioned concerning the presence of pretense and the thoughts and beliefs of the TV characters. The children where also presented with false belief and appearance/reality theory of mind tasks. Children who identified when TV characters were engaging in pretend play did not necessarily infer the pretenders thoughts and beliefs. Inferring pretenders' thoughts was related to performance on false belief and appearance/reality tasks, but simply recognizing pretense was not. These data support the view that children initially learn to recognize pretense from contextual cues and are able to infer pretenders' beliefs only with further development of metarepresentational ability.     

Inferring False Beliefs from Actions and Reactions

Current evidence suggests that young children have little understanding of false belief. Standard false belief tasks, however, may underestimate children's ability for 2 reasons. First, the only cue to belief in these tasks is a protagonist's lack of perceptual access to some critical event, and this may not be a very salient cue for young children. Second, the standard tasks require children to make forward-looking predictions from the causes of a belief (e.g., from what a protagonist has or has not perceived) to either the protagonist's belief or the protagonist's action, and children may not be very skilled at making such predictions. In 2 experiments we investigated whether 3-year-olds would do better on tasks in which the belief cues were stronger, and in which they could reason backward to the belief from its effects (e.g., from a protagonist's actions and reactions). Even on these easy tasks, however, they did not perform well. These findings provide strong support for the view that children of this age do not fully understand the representational nature of belief.     

Children’s development of a theory of mind

A critical review of the literature on the theory of mind is presented. Consistent with the “early onset” view, it is suggested that important precursors of a theory of mind are found much earlier than the age of 4. Research on emotional development and intentional communication is reviewed to suggest that some rudimentary understanding of other people’s minds occurs before the age of 2. Later, 3-year-olds’ engagement in pretense and deception demonstrates a more sophisticated understanding of other people’s mental states. Limitations of the false belief task for determining the acquisition of a theory of mind will be discussed with reference to findings in the adult literature.     

孤儿错误信念认知与情绪理解发展及教育对策

研究用2个心理理论范式测量错误信念认知和情绪理解能力,比较33名孤儿和33名非孤儿的表现,并分析了错误信念认知和情绪理解的关系。结果显示:(1)孤儿错误信念认知水平发展趋势与非孤儿一致,但孤儿的错误信念认知能力发展显著低于非孤儿;(2)孤儿的情绪理解发展趋势和水平与非孤儿基本一致;(3)儿童(包括孤儿)错误信念认知和情绪理解在3-5岁期间发生明显变化,大多数儿童在5岁时已基本具备错误信念认知和情绪理解的能力,4岁是儿童错误信念认知和情绪理解能力发展的重要年龄;(4)儿童错误信念认知与情绪理解关系密切。     

Children's judgments of emotion from conflicting cues in speech: why 6-year-olds are so inflexible

Six-year-old children can judge a speaker's feelings either from content or paralanguage but have difficulty switching the basis of their judgments when these cues conflict. This inflexibility may relate to a lexical bias in 6-year-olds' judgments. Two experiments tested this claim. In Experiment 1, 6-year-olds (n = 40) were as inflexible when switching from paralanguage to content as when switching from content to paralanguage. In Experiment 2, 6-year-olds (n = 32) and adults (n = 32) had more difficulty when switching between conflicting emotion cues than conflicting nonemotional cues. Thus, 6-year-olds' inflexibility appears to be tied to the presence of conflicting emotion cues in speech rather than a bias to judge a speaker's feelings from content.     

Interference control in a new rule use task: age-related changes, labeling, and attention

Three experiments examined 3- to 6-year-olds' interference control using a task in which children saw 2 corresponding sets of colored cards, a large set in front of them and a small set behind them. A colored candy (Smartie) was placed on a large card with mismatching color, and children could win the Smartie by selecting the small card that matched the color of the large card. Three-year-olds performed poorly whereas older children performed well. Having children label the correct color before responding improved 3-year-olds' performance (Experiment 2), as did pointing to the large card (Experiment 3); decreasing the affective salience of the stimuli (colored beads vs. Smarties) did not (Experiment 3). Results reveal the role of selective attention in action control.