Origin and Truth: Young Children's Understanding of Imaginary Mental Representations

In 2 studies, we address young children's understanding of the origin and representational relations of imagination, a fictional mental state, and contrast this with their understanding of knowledge, an epistemic mental state. In the first study, 54 3- and 4-year-old children received 2 tasks to assess their understanding of origins, and 4 stories to assess their understanding of representational relations. Children of both ages understood that, whereas perception is necessary for knowledge, it is irrelevant for imagination. Results for children's understanding of representational relations revealed intriguing developmental differences. Although children understood that knowledge represents reality more truthfully than imagination, 3-year-olds often claimed that imagination reflected reality. The second study provided additional evidence that younger 3-year-olds judge that imaginary representations truthfully reflect reality. We propose that children's responses indicate an early understanding of the distinction between mental states and the world, but also a confusion regarding the extent to which mental contents represent the physical world.     

Young Children's Awareness of Their Mental Activity: The Case of Mental Rotation

From Piaget's early work to current theory of mind research, young children have been characterized as having little or no awareness of their mental activity. This conclusion was reexamined by assessing children's conscious access to visual imagery. Four-year-olds, 6-year-olds, and adults were given a mental rotation task in the form of a computer game, but with no instructions to use mental rotation and no other references to mental activity. During the task, participants were asked to explain how they made their judgments. Reaction time patterns and verbal reports revealed that 6-year-olds were comparable to adults both in their spontaneous use and subjective awareness of mental rotation. Four-year-olds who referred to mental activity to explain their performance had reaction time and error patterns consistent with mental rotation; 4-year-olds who did not refer to mental activity responded randomly. A second study with 5-year-olds produced similar results. This research demonstrates that conscious access to at least 1 type of thinking is present earlier than previously recognized. It also helps to clarify the conditions under which young children will and will not notice and report their mental activity. These findings have implications for competing accounts of children's developing understanding of the mind and for the "imagery debate."     

Young Children's Understanding of Fictional versus Epistemic Mental Representations: Imagination and Belief

In 2 studies, 3- and 4-year-old children's ability to reason about the relation between mental representations and reality was examined. In the first study, children received parallel false belief and "false" imagination tasks. Results revealed that children performed better on imagination tasks than on belief tasks. The second study demonstrated that, when various alternative explanations for better performance on the imagination task were controlled for, children still performed significantly better when reasoning about another person's imagination than when reasoning about another person's belief. These findings suggest that children's understanding that mental representations can differ from reality may emerge first with respect to representations that do not purport to represent reality truthfully.     

Young Children's Understanding of Addition Concepts

Children's knowledge of concrete versions of additive composition, commutativity and associativity was investigated in two studies. In Study 1, 24 four- to five-year-olds and 25 five- to six-year-olds judged the equivalence of conceptually related addition problems presented using groups of objects. In Study 2, 45 five- to six-year-olds judged related problems and solved addition problems. Both studies indicated that concrete versions of principles were salient to most children although associativity was more difficult than commutativity and there were considerable individual differences in children's understanding. Study 1 results indicated that schoolchildren were more accurate at recognising additive composition than preschoolers and Study 2 results suggested that commutativity knowledge was related to using advanced counting strategies for solving addition problems. Overall, the research supports the claim that examining early knowledge of addition principles provides important insights into children's emerging part-whole knowledge and mathematical development.     

Transfer in Young Children's Understanding of Spatial Representations

The creative and flexible use of symbols is a unique human ability. In order to use a symbol, one must understand the basic relation between the symbol and what it represents. How do young children come to appreciate such relations? One possibility is that insight into one symbolic relation helps children appreciate different ones. The 3 studies presented here support this possibility. In Experiments 1 and 2, both 2.5- and 3.0-year-old children showed transfer from an easy task that required appreciation of a model-room symbolic relation to a more difficult one, one that children their age typically do not appreciate. In Experiment 3, 2.5-year-olds showed transfer between symbol types: Experience with a model-room relation helped them appreciate a map-room relation. These transfer effects are consistent with the claim that early experience with symbolic relations contributes to symbolic sensitivity, a basic readiness to recognize that one object or event may stand for another.     

Young Children's Understanding of the Mind-Body Distinction

4 experiments investigated children's understanding of the mind-body distinction. Children of ages 4 and 5 recognized not only the differential modifiability of changeable versus unchangeable human properties and bodily versus mental properties, but also the independence of activities of bodily organs from a person's intention (Experiment 1). When presented 3 types of causal explanations (i.e., intentional, vitalistic, mechanical), 6-year-olds chose most often as most plausible for bodily functions vitalistic explanations (i.e., those ascribing the phenomena to a relevant bodily organ's initiative and effortful engagement in activity); 8-year-olds chose the vitalistic explanations second most often, following mechanical ones (Experiment 2). However, 6-year-olds, as well as 8-year-olds and adults, did not always choose vitalistic explanations over intentional explanations (Experiment 3); whereas they tended to prefer vitalistic explanations for biological phenomena, they predominantly accepted intentional ones for psychological phenomena (Experiment 3A). These results suggest that children as young as 6 years of age have acquired a form of biology as an autonomous domain which is separate from that of psychology.     

Young Children's Understanding of Forgetting over Time

2 studies investigated young children's understanding that as the retention interval increases, so do the chances that one will forget. In Study 1 (24 3-year-olds and 24 4-year-olds), 4-year-olds but not 3-year-olds understood that of 2 characters who simultaneously saw an object, the character who waited longer before attempting to find it would not remember where it was. In study 2 (24 3-year-olds and 24 4-year-olds), 4-year-olds but not 3-year-olds understood that of 2 objects seen by a character, the object that was seen a "long long time ago" would be forgotten and the object seen "a little while ago" would be remembered. The findings are discussed in relation to research on young children's understanding of the acquisition, retention, and retrieval of knowledge over time.     

幼儿对幽默的理解及其绘画表现

本研究采用观察、访谈等形式,对上海市某幼儿园大班的12名5～6岁幼儿的幽默理解和幽默创造能力进行研究.研究发现,学前儿童已经具备一定的幽默理解能力,并且理解角度各不相同;学前儿童已经能够初步用绘画的方式表现自己的幽默创造,并且在内容和形式上都能体现幽默的感觉.     

幼儿对幽默的理解及其绘画表现

本研究采用观察、访谈等形式,对上海市某幼儿园大班的12名5～6岁幼儿的幽默理解和幽默创造能力进行研究。研究发现,学前儿童已经具备一定的幽默理解能力,并且理解角度各不相同;学前儿童已经能够初步用绘画的方式表现自己的幽默创造,并且在内容和形式上都能体现幽默的感觉。     

Young Children's Understanding of Thought Bubbles and of Thoughts

In a series of 4 studies, we explored preschoolers' understanding of thought bubbles. Very few 3-year-olds or 4-year-olds we tested knew what a thought-bubble depiction was without instruction. But, if simply told that the thought bubble "shows what someone is thinking," the vast majority of 3-year-olds and 4-year-olds easily understood the devices as depicting thoughts generally and individual thought contents specifically. In total, these children used thought-bubble depictions to ascertain the contents of characters' thoughts in a variety of situations; appropriately distinguished such depictions from mere associated actions or objects; described thought bubbles in the language of mental states; judged that persons' thoughts in these depictions were subjective in the sense of person-specific (and hence 2 people can have different thoughts about the same state of affairs); and judged that thought-bubble thoughts ( a ) were representational in the sense of depicting or showing some other state of affairs, ( b ) were mental and thus showed intangible, private, internal thoughts unlike real pictures or photographs, and ( c ) can be false, that is, can depict a person's misrepresentation of some state of affairs. We discuss the implications of these findings for young children's understanding of thoughts and thought bubbles, for their learning and comprehension of pictorial conventions, and for the use of thought bubbles to assess children's early understanding of mind.     

Young Children's Emotion Comprehension and Theory of Mind Understanding

Research Findings: The present study investigated the relation between theory of mind (ToM) and emotion understanding among 78 children 4½ to 6½ years old (35 boys, 43 girls). ToM understanding was assessed using ignorance and false belief questions within an emotion-understanding task that evaluated children's abilities to recognize facial expressions and identify the external causes of emotions (happy, sad, angry, scared, and surprised), understand the role of beliefs and desires in emotion, and comprehend felt versus expressed emotions. Results indicated that children's understanding of the external causes of emotion, hidden emotions, and a reminder's influence on emotions improved with age and that children's understanding of the external causes of emotion related to ToM understanding. Practice or Policy: Findings suggest that programs that seek to promote children's socioemotional awareness could benefit from encouraging the development of children's understanding of the external causes of emotions to improve overall social cognition.     

Like Father, Like Son: Young Children's Understanding of How and Why Offspring Resemble Their Parents

4 studies investigated the broad claim that preschoolers understand biological inheritance. In Study 1, 4–7-year-old children were told a story in which a boy was born to one man and adopted by another. The biological father was described as having one set of features (e.g., green eyes) and the adoptive father as having another (e.g., brown eyes). Subjects were asked which man the boy would resemble when he grew up. Preschoolers showed little understanding that selective chains of processes mediate resemblance to parents. It was not until age 7 that children substantially associated the boy with his biological father on physical features and his adoptive father on beliefs. That is, it was not until age 7 that children demonstrated that they understood birth as part of a process selectively mediating the acquisition of physical traits and learning or nurturance as mediating the acquisition of beliefs. In Study 2, subjects were asked whether, as a boy grew up, various of his features could change. Children generally shared our adult intuitions, indicating that their failure in Study 1 was not due to their having a different sense of what features can change. Studies 3 and 4 replicated Study 1, with stories involving mothers instead of fathers and with lessened task demands. Taken together, the results of the 4 studies refute the claim that preschoolers understand biological inheritance. The findings are discussed in terms of whether children understand biology as an autonomous cognitive domain.     

Young Children's Understanding of the Causes of Anger and Sadness

This study investigated kindergarten children's understanding of the causes of anger and sadness. Previous research has shown that before 6 or 7 years of age, children have difficulty distinguishing hypothetical situations designed to evoke anger from those designed to evoke sadness. In this project, 80 kindergarten children (ages 5-1 to 6-5, M = 5-10) predicted and explained protagonists' emotional responses to a variety of hypothetical events. The results showed that intentional harm was not the feature young children used to distinguish anger from sadness. Children predicted anger most often when they believed that protagonists could change undesirable situations and reinstate their goals and when children focused on the person or conditions that brought about undesirable situations. Children predicted sadness most often when they believed that goal reinstatement was impossible and focused on the losses that would ensue as a result.     

Revisiting Young Children's Understanding of the Psychological Causes of Behavior

In 1989, Miller and Aloise challenged the prevailing belief that preschoolers tend to explain others' behavior in terms of external events or a person's physical attributes and have little understanding of psychological causes. That review documented preschoolers' understanding of, and even preference for, psychological causes as part of an emerging renaissance in developmental social‐cognitive research. The present, updated review (97 articles, participant ages 3 months to 6 years) suggests the emergence of a transformative new perspective in which social‐cognition is balanced between social and cognitive aspects rather than tilted toward cognition. Recent research on infants' awareness of mental states, young children's understanding of social categories and their judgments of the trustworthiness of informants, and cultural context reveals various ways in which preschoolers' social‐causal reasoning is social.     

Young Children's Understanding of a Biological Basis for Parent-Offspring Relations

2 experiments evaluated whether young children understand that kinship implies, but does not guarantee, physical resemblance among family members. In Experiment 1, preschoolers expected adopted babies to share physical properties, but not beliefs and preferences, with their biological parents rather than with their adoptive ones. However, preschoolers in Experiment 2 recognized that shared properties per se do not guarantee kinship: a baby who looks like and lives with a woman is not her biological baby if he or she initially grew inside someone else, whereas a baby may neither resemble nor live with its biological parents. Overall, the results suggest that children expect parents and offspring to share physical properties, but understand that shared properties do not necessarily entail kinship. In both experiments, the extent of this understanding increased with age. However, preschoolers' overall performance supports the claim that some children at this age have a naive theory of biology. The results further suggest that the critical development in an understanding of kinship is acquisition of factual knowledge rather than structural change.     

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.     

Understanding Young Children's Three‐Dimensional Creative Potential in Art Making

This article explores aspects of young children's three‐dimensional development in art making. Understanding young children's three‐dimensional awareness and development is often a neglected area of early childhood educators' education and practice and often children's creative potential is not fully realised. The present article is based on a small scale qualitative study which focused on understanding 5–6 year‐olds' representational intentions in three‐dimensional artworks, understanding of visual/design concepts and expressive use of media (scrap paper and mod roc). The findings of the study suggest that young children are able to create satisfying three‐dimensional representations giving emphasis on forms, uprightness, balance, movement and modeling of multiple sides.     

Young Children's Conceptualization of Pretense: Action or Mental Representational State?

A growing body of research indicates that children do not understand mental representation until around age 4. However, children engage in pretend play by age 2, and pretending seems to require understanding mental representation. This apparent contradiction has been reconciled by the claim that in pretense there is precocious understanding of mental representation. 4 studies tested this claim by presenting children with protagonists who were not mentally representing something (i.e., an animal), either because they did not know about the animal or simply because they were not thinking about being the animal. However, the protagonists were acting in ways that could be consistent with pretending to be that animal. Children were then asked whether the protagonists were pretending to be that animal, and children tended to answer in the affirmative. The results suggest that 4-year-olds do not understand that pretending requires mental representation. Children appear to misconstrue pretense as its common external manifestations, such as actions, until at least the sixth year.     

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.