How Children develop mentalising

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What is the theory of mind?
The insight that people hold mental states and that these govern behaviour, mental states: EG, belief, desire, goals, allows us to make sense of the social world to predicts and explain people's action
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What are people's desires?
Idiosyncratic and constantly changing, do children understand the other people may have desires that differ from theirs
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REpacholi and Gopnik (1997)
18 m but not 14m understood that the experimenter's desired food differed from theirs, suggests they understand that desire is a subjective mental state that can differ from person to person
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What is the distinction between mind and world require?
Notion that a person has a representation of the world, the contents of which may be quite different from the contents of the world itself, shift from a situation based to a representation based understanding of behaviour
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What did 3 year old children usually do?
fail False belief tasks
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What did 4 year old children usually do?
Pass false belief tasks
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What was this traditionally taken as?
Evidence that around this time children acquire a theory of mind
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For example?
Radical conceptual shift and stage like development around 4 years
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What does the FB task underestimate?
Younger children's ability
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What is the definition of competence?
Conceptual understanding required to solve the problem
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What is the definition of performance?
Other cognitive skills required to access and express understanding (ability to remember key info, focus attention, comprehend the question)
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How could performance be better?
Lack of positive evidence doesn't necessarily mean lack of competence, problem with language, temporal marking, story comprehension,
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What did simplifying the task do?
Improves performance but not dramatically
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What are boosters?
Early onset view --> Early competence ,
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What is the Posits?
Early competence is masked by performance limitations, task manipulations may enhance performance
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What should 3 year olds be able to do?
Perform above chance
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What is a Scoffer?
Delayed onset view --> Conceptual change
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What is the posits?
Performance must change from incorrect to systematically above chance, developmental change on FB tasks reflects genuine conceptual change
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What should not account completely for performance?
Task demands/processing limitations
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Wellman, Cross and Watson (2001)
30 Months: 80% incorrect, 44 months: 50% correct, 56 months: 75% correct, 4 years above chance
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Which variables would not make a difference?
Type of task/question, nature of protagonist/object irrelevant
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Which variables make a difference?
Deceptive motive, active participation and salience of mental state improve performance
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What did Wellman et al (2001) conclude?
Their findings are more in line with the conceptual change (scoffers) account
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However?
Manipulating several variables improved performance this was the case across all ages rather than just young children, None of the variable manipulations improved performance of 3 year olds above chance
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What are the cross cultural comparisons?
Despite leading very different lives children in industrialised societies and those in more rural societies show similar developmental shift between 3 and 5 years
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What is the first factor contributing to TOM development?
Role of social experience in aiding understanding of mental states - arises from interactions from other people
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What is the second factor contributing to ToM development?
Biological maturation enables children to express their understanding of mental states -arises from improvement in executive functioning
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Harris (1999)
Conversation in general are crucial for exposing children to other people's perspectives, they provide children with the vocabularly needed to discuss and reflect on mental states
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What is the first role of experience?
Children with older siblings show earlier ToM,
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What is the second role of experience?
Children whose parents talk about mental states more understand false belief earlier than other children
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What is the last role of experience ?
Deaf children of hearing parents show a developmental lag on Fb tasks, parents cant sign abstract things, sich as mental state, therefore children cant develop language fully and so develop a theory of mind later on in life
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In contrast?
Deaf children of signing parents are comparable with hearing children
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Wellman and Liu developed what?
The theory of mind scale
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Diverse Desires
People can have different desires for the same thing
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Diverse beliefs
People can have different beliefs about the same situation
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Knowledge access
Something can be true, but someone might not know that
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False belief
Something can be true, but someone might falsely believe something different
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Hidden emotion
Someone can feel one way but display a different emotion
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What is the theory of mind scale in western countries?
DD > DB> KA > FB > HE
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What is theory of mind scale in Chinese and iranian children?
DD > KA > DB > FB > HE
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What is thought to be related?
Differences in cultural values: collectivist vs individualism
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What is the role of excutive functioning?
Children's failures of ToM tasks may stem not from pure conceptual limitations but rather from problems translating conceptual knowledge into successful action
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What is the critical role of executive functions?
Ability to pass ToM tasks, a set of domain general cognitive abilities that helps us to control and guide our attention and behaviour
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What is inhibition?
Ignoring distracting information or suppressing unwanted responses
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What is this example in real life?
Stop yourself reaching for that bar chocolate! Ignoring text message/email alerts when trying to work
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What is this example in the lab?
Bear/dragon task (When bear does something, copy, Dragon: Dont copy), stroop paradigm
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What is the cognitive flexibility?
REsponding to the same thing in different ways depending on the context
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What is a real life example?
Multiple passwords/pin numbers, up VS down in lift, alarm on Vs off
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What is a lab example?
Wisconsin card sorting test, task switching paradigm
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What is working memory?
Holding important information on your goal in mind, manipulating information in your head
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What is a real life example?
Mental shopping list, mental arithmetic
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What is a lab example?
Digit span, spatial span
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How is Executive function needed for successful performance on false belief tasks?
Cognitive inhibition to disengage from real world situation to attend to an abstract representation, response inhibition to an habitual way of responding, working memory: Indicate correct answer while holding in mind 2 diff representations
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What parts of the brain are important for executive function?
Frontal lobes of the brain are very important for executive functions, they take a long time to develop
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When do important developments in inhibitory control take place?
In the first 6 years of life with marked improvement between age 3 or 6
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What is the role of EF in false belief tasks?
Evidence of strong positive correlation between children's inhibitory control (Bear/dragon task) and FB performance
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What did suggests?
DEvelopment in IC and ToM may be related
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What might IC be?
A crucial enabling factor for ToM development, possibly affecting both the emergence and expression of mental state knowledge
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What are the developmental changes in performance on FB tasks?
3 year old children usually fail Fb tasks, 4 year old children usually pass FB taks
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What was traditionally taken as?
Evidence that around this time children acquire a theory of mind, above task requires child to make an explicit judgement about another's mental state
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What did children demonstrate earlier?
Implicit understanding of belief
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What is explicit knowledge?
Knowledge easily accessible to the child, measure via elicited response eg: verbal answer to a question
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What is implicit knowledge?
Knowledge the child is unaware of
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What is measured for implicit knowledge?
Emotional response, anticipatory looking, violation of expectancy
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What is investigated to show understanding of False belief?
Children's facial expressions as indices of their belief understanding, predicted that if 3 yols were aware of conflict between a person's belief and reality, they will show signs of suspense when observing an actor about to act on basis of their FB
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What was found?
Found greater instances of expressed tension in the false belief cf. true belief condition, suggests 3 yos were aware of another's FB and recognised the affective consequences of the FB
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In contrast?
Children's performance on a clssic FB task was poor and unrelated to the amount of expressions they displayed while watching th FB videos
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What does suggests?
Expressions are independent from and emerge prior to explicit knowledge of false beliefs
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AIm?
To get evidence for a period of implicit understanding of FB that precedes the onset of explicit understanding
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Method?
Tested 44 children aged 2 y 5m -4 y 6m on unexpected transfer task
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Implicit measure?
Anticipatory looking
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What is explicit measure?
Standard verbal behaviour
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What was the control condition?
True belief task
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What was the task?
Sam goes to sleep, Katie moves the cheese, anticipation prompt: Sam is waking up. He is going to get his cheese. I wonder where he is going to look,
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What was the result of implicit measure?
86% children over 2 year 11 month showed looking pattern indicative of FB understanding, only 1 child under 2 year 11 month
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What is the dissociation of implicit: Explicit understanding of belief?
3 Yr olds looked to correct location even though gave incorrect answer, large gap between implicit and explicit undertanding from 2 yr 11 months
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What did the data suggest?
Children develop an implicit or unconscious understanding of false belief at an earlier age than they develop an explicit or conscious understanding of FB at an earlier age, they develop explicit understanding
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Southgate, Senju and Csibra (207)
• Used anticipatory looking • Earlier FB understanding than Clements & Perner (1994) may be due to methodological differences e.g.: – Non-verbal prompt Toy is removed from the scene to avoid “reality bias
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Onishi and Baillargeon (2005)
• Used a totally nonverbal task to test for implicit FB understanding in 15 month old infants • Violation of expectancy method
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Looking time studies with infants?
• Familiarise infant to an event • Present test behaviour that is either: – Consistent – Inconsistent
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What happens with the prior event?
• If infant looks longer at inconsistent event taken as evidence that they are surprised • Indicates some level of knowledge about what should happen
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What is the access rule?
– initially understand the relationship between seeing and knowing and rigidly follow: seeing/being told = knowing
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What is the no access rule?
– then overextend rule to form the rule that: not seeing or not being told = ignorance
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What is the evidence for the access rule?
– 3-4 yr olds attribute knowledge to observer who sees or is told content of a container and – ignorance to observer with neither informational access
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What is the evidence for the no access rule?
– Attribute ignorance of observer who has not seen/being told even if the observer has some other source of information about event
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Sodian and Wimmer 1987
Cannot see, children aged
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What are people's desires?

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Idiosyncratic and constantly changing, do children understand the other people may have desires that differ from theirs

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REpacholi and Gopnik (1997)

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Card 4

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What is the distinction between mind and world require?

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What did 3 year old children usually do?

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