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 behaviours, Mental states: EG, Belief, desire, goals
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What are the desires based on TOM?
People's desires are idiosyncratic and constantly changing, do children understand that other people may have desires that differ from theirs
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Repacholi and Gopnik (1997)
18m 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 does distinction between the mind/world require?
Requires the 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 are the interpretations of the findings?
3 year old children usually fail false belief tasks, 4 year old children usually pass false belief tasks
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What is competence?
Conceptual understanding required to solve the problem
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What is performance?
Other cognitive skills required to access and express understanding (Ability to remember key info, focus attention, comprehend the question
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What can younger children show?
Better performance when the tasks are simplified , lack of positive evidence doesnt mean lack of competence, performance limitations masking children's competence, story comprehension, changing the test question
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What are boosters?
Early onset view --> Early competence, Posits: Early competence is masked by performance limitations, task manipulations may enhance performance, 3 year old, should be able to perform above chance
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What are scoffers?
Delayed onset view --> Conceptual change
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What are the posists?
Performance must change from incorrect to systematically above chance, developmental change on FB tasks reflects genuine conceptual change
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What are task demands?
They should not account completely for performance
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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 task variables make a difference?
Deceptive motive, active participation and salience of mental state improve performance
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What are the task variables that do not make a difference?
Type of task/question, nature of a protagonist/object irrelevant
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What did Wellman et al (2001) conclude?
That their findings are more in line with the conceptual change (scoffers) account: Although manipulating several variables improved performance, this was the case across all ages rather than just younger children - not selectively unmasking competen
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What are none of the variable manipulations?
They 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 are the factors contributing to TOM development?
1. Role of social experience in aiding understanding of mental states - arises from interactions from other people
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What is the 2nd factor contributing to TOM development?
Biological mutation 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's people's perspectives, they provide children with the vocabulary needed to discuss and reflect on mental states
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What are 3 experiences that can lead to the development of ToM?
Children with older siblings show earlier ToM, children whose parents talk about mental states more understand false belief earlier than other children, deaf children of hearing parents show a developmental lag on fb tasks
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What about parents who cant sign normally?
Parents who cant sign abstract things, such as mental states, therefore children can't develop language fully and so develop a theory of mind later in life
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What about parents who can sign normally?
Deaf children of signing parents are comparable with hearing children
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Wellman and Liu: 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 thing
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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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Children in western countries?
DD > DB > KA > FB > HE
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Chinese and iranian children
DD > KA > DB > FB > HE
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What is the role of executive 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?
Executive functions in ability to pass ToM tasks
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What is a set of domain general cognitive abilities?
Help us 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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Real life
Stop yourself for reaching for chocolate or ignoring text message when trying to work
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In the lab
Bear/Dragon task (When bear does something copy, Dragon: Dont copy, stroop paradigm
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Cognitive flexibility
Responding to the same thing in different ways depending on the context
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Real life?
Multiple passwords/PIN numbers, Up and down in lift, alarm on Vs off
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In the lab?
Wisconsin card sorting test, task switching paradigm
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Working memory
Holding important information on your 'goal in mind, manipulating information in your head
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Real life
Mental shopping list, mental arithmetic
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In the lab
Digit span, spatial span
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What is cognitive inhibition?
To disengage from a salient real world situation to attend to an intangible abstract representation
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What is response inhibition?
To inhibit a prepotent or habitual way of responding (Pointing to the true location of the object)
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What is the working memory?
To indicate the correct answer while holding in mind two different conflicting representations
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What are the executive functions?
The frontal lobes of the brain are very important for executive functions, they take a long time to develop, important developments in inhibitory control take place in the first 6 years of life with marked improvement between 3 and 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 and FB performance
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What is suggested?
Development in Ic and ToM may be related, IC may be a crucial enabling factor for ToM development possibly affecting both the emergence and expression of mental state knowledge
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What leads to changes in performance on FB tasks?
3 year old children usually fail FB tasks, 4 year old children usually pass FB tasks
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What was traditionally taken?
As evidence that around this time children 'acquire' a theory of mind
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What is explicit knowledge?
Knowledge accessible to the child, measure via elicited response e.g. verbal answer to a question
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What is implicit knowledge?
Knowledge the child is unaware of
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How is implicit knowledge measured?
Emotional response, anticipatory looking, violation of expectancy
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Why is the implicit understanding of FB?
Investigated children's facial expression as indices of their belief understanding
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What was predicted?
If 3 year olds aware of the conflict between a person's belief and reality they will show signs of suspenc when observing an actor about to act on basis of their false belief
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What are the results?
Found greater instances of expressed tension in the false belief cf true belief condition
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What was suggested?
3 year olds were aware of another's false belief and recognised the affective consequences of the false belief
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What is the contrast?
Children's performance on a classic FB task was poor and unrelated to the amount of expressions they displayed while watching the FB videos
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What was suggested?
Expressions are independent from and emerge prior to explicit knowledge of false beliefs
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What is the aim?
To get evidence for a period of implicit understanding of FB that precedes the onset of explicit understanding
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What is the method?
Tested 44 children aged 2 year 5 months - 4 year 6 month on unexpected transfer task
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What is the implicit measure?
Anticipatory looking
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What is the explicit measure?
Standard verbal response
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What is the control condition?
True belief task
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What is the true belief 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 is the test question?
Which box will he open first? direct measure
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What is the 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 year olds looked to correct location even though they gave the incorrect answer, large gap between implicit and explicit understanding from 2 year old
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What does data suggest
Children develop an implicit or unconscious understanding of false belief at an earlier age than they develop an explicit or conscious understanding
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Southgate, Senju and Csibra (2007)
Used anticipatory looking, earlier FB understanding may be due to methodological differences eg: Non verbal prompt, toy is removed from the scene to avoid reality bias
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Onishi and Baillargeon (2005)
Used a totally non verbal task to test for implicit FB understanding in 15 month old infants, violation of expectancy method
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What is the looking time with infants?
• Familiarise infant to an event • Present test behaviour that is either: – Consistent – Inconsistent
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With the prior event?
If infant looks longer at inconsistent event taken as evidence that they are suprised, 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 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 (e.g. Wimmer et al, 1988)
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What is the evidence for the non access rule?
– Attribute ignorance of observer who has not seen/being told even if the observer has some other source of information about event (Ruffman, 1996) Ignore non-visual sources of info (logical inference)
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Sodian and Wimmer, 1987
Cannot see but children aged < 6 years 'It was an m&M' would someone else know it was an M and M? No - inference neglect
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What is summary?
Children can pass FB test age 4 but not before, • children overapply some ToM rules
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What are the desires based on TOM?

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People's desires are idiosyncratic and constantly changing, do children understand that other people may have desires that differ from theirs

Card 3

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Repacholi and Gopnik (1997)

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Card 4

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What does distinction between the mind/world require?

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Card 5

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What are the interpretations of the findings?

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