Children's Theories of Mind

Mental States and Social Understanding

Douglas Frye, Chris Moore

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317784692
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book is a result of a study group that met to discuss the child's theory of mind. A topic whose effects span cognitive, language, and social development, it may bring a unifying influence to developmental psychology. New studies in this area acknowledge children's conceptions of intention and belief, as well as intention and belief themselves, and consider the explanations they provide for children's developing abilities. The contributors to this important volume examine several aspects of the child's theory of mind, and present significant research findings on the theory itself and how it changes and develops for each child. Discussions of the utility of a theory of mind to the child, and to developmental psychologists trying to understand children, are provided. Finally, new explanations are offered for how children acquire a theory of mind in the first place.

CHAPTER 1

The Acquisition and Utility of Theories of Mind

Chris Moore

Dalhousie University

Douglas Frye

Yale University

Imagine that the following story is acted out for a child: A boy comes home, places some chocolate in a cupboard, and then leaves the room. While he is gone, his mother comes in and happens to move the chocolate to another cupboard. Later, the boy returns and wants to eat the chocolate. Where will the boy look?

Notice that a correct answer to this question depends on the child knowing something about the beliefs of the boy in the story. In other words, it depends on the child having a “theory of mind” (Astington, Harris, & Olson, 1988), that is, an understanding that people have mental states including thoughts, beliefs, and desires.¹ In this instance, the child must realize that the boy’s beliefs do not match reality. Wimmer and Perner (1983), who devised the false belief paradigm, found that younger children say that the boy will open the cupboard where the chocolate actually is. It is not until 4 or 5 years of age that their results indicate that the boy will look in the original cupboard. Subsequent studies (Baron-Cohen, Leslie, & Frith, 1985; Gopnik & Astington, 1988; Perner, Leekam, & Wimmer, 1987) have confirmed these findings.

There has been a sharp increase over the past several years in the amount of research conducted on what children know about their own and other people’s minds. The increase would seem to be justified for two basic and related reasons. A theory of mind makes an enormous difference to the child. As the preceding example illustrates, it transforms the way children are able to see other people and make sense of what they are doing. Of course, it also makes a difference to our understanding of the child. If the results of the false belief task are a guide, then making sense of “the child’s theory of mind” will be important for explaining developmental changes in the child’s responses to situations where they must consider what other people are actually doing—in other words, almost all social situations.

The contributors to this volume discuss several aspects of the child’s theory of mind. They present research that illuminates the young child’s theory of mind and how it changes. That research stands well on its own. They also provide discussions of the utility of a theory of mind to the child and to developmental psychologists trying to understand children. Finally, new explanations are offered for how children acquire such a theory in the first place. The question of acquisition is a very difficult one. Because the mental states of others cannot be observed, how does the young child ever come to postulate their existence? Some background to the questions of the utility of the child’s theory of mind and how theories of mind may be acquired is sketched in the following section.

THE UTILITY OF A THEORY OF MIND TO THE CHILD

The major ways in which the development of a theory of mind enters the life of the child can be placed in two familiar categories. A theory of mind, is firstly and most obviously, a powerful social tool.² It allows the explanation, prediction, and manipulation of the behavior of others. Secondly, acquiring a theory of mind may well be instrumental in the development of particular forms of reasoning and, as such, may represent a significant step in cognitive development.

Social Function

At its most basic, social behavior can be broken down into cooperation and competition. We either try to work with others to achieve goals of mutual benefit or we try to improve our position at the expense of others. (Often, of course, cooperation and competition become combined, as when we form alliances to compete with others; examples can be found throughout social behavior, from friendships to team sports to war.) The common elements of mental state psychology–belief, desire, and intention–play central roles in competitive and cooperative social behavior. For example, competition requires recognizing when other people’s desires conflict with our own so that those desires can be blocked or overcome. One of the first competitive strategies that makes its way into the child’s behavioral repertoire is deception, including lying (Chandler, Fritz, & Hala, 1989; Lewis, Stanger, & Sullivan, 1989; Shultz & Cloghesy, 1981; Sodian, in press; Wimmer & Perner, 1983). Although deception can occur at a number of different levels (Mitchell, 1986), the more effective variants depend entirely on mental state psychology. The point of lying is to give someone else a false belief, a misrepresentation of reality. Effective lying means telling them something they are likely to believe. Thus, lying well requires knowing that others can have false beliefs and having some idea of which ones they are likely to embrace.

A form of cooperation that is noteworthy, both because it carries such powerful social force and because it provides an intriguing puzzle for theories of social behavior, is altruism. In order to behave altruistically, it is, by definition, necessary to take into account the needs and desires of others. It is probably also important to be able to assess the beliefs that others have about us; for example, knowing that others will think well of us if we act altruistically but poorly if we do not. Certainly, the middle stages of moral reasoning which Kohlberg and his followers (e.g., Colby, Kohlberg, Gibbs, & Lieberman, 1983) have claimed characterize most adolescents and adults seem to be based on the ability for such an assessment.

Lastly, in a social world where both competition and cooperation are possible, the judgment of intention appears to be particularly useful. Ascribing intention to others allows one to look for the goals in the other’s actions (Premack & Woodruff, 1978). In addition, the assessment of other people’s intentions provides an index of the valence of their attitudes towards us. For example, if someone performs an action with deleterious consequences for another, then it is to the latter’s advantage to know whether that action reflected a negative attitude on the part of the actor and may be repeated, or whether it was essentially a mistake. Dunn (see chapter 6, this volume) presents some examples that may reveal the developmental origins of this process.

Cognitive Function

It is becoming reasonably well established that a theory of mind turns on the ability to represent mental states and processes. Terms such as metacognition and metarepresentation are often used in this context, and it is worth explicating these further. Metacognition usually denotes knowledge about the cognitive system, including, perhaps most obviously, memory. Since the 1960s, it has been known that children’s understanding of memory changes with age and that their memory performance appears to be tied to their knowledge of mnemonic strategies. For example, Flavell and his colleagues (e.g., Flavell, 1970; Keeney, Cannizzo, & Flavell, 1967; Moely, Olson, Halwes, & Flavell, 1969) showed that, although young children tended not to employ strategies such as rehearsal on short-term memory tasks and consequently performed poorly, this failure could be construed as a production deficit rather than a mediation deficit. Teaching the children to use memory strategies greatly improved memory performance.

Metarepresentation is a term more commonly employed in the literature on the theory of mind. Two usages of this term need to differentiated. Firstly, metarepresentation can be taken to mean merely embedding one representation within another. Thus, one can think about a thought that another person has. Conceivably, such embedding can occur to an infinite extent. Secondly, metarepresentation can mean modelling the representational process (Perner, 1988a) so that, for example, one can think about another’s belief as false. In the latter case, we are talking about representing a representation as a representation of reality or, in other words, judging how the person’s representation relates to the world.

The development of metarepresentation in the second sense results in an important change in the way the child thinks about the world. Acquiring such a theory of mind involves the simultaneous recognition that there is a single reality but that different people, or the same people at different times, may have different representations of that reality. In other words, the child develops a distinction between subjective and objective (Russell, 1984). Such a distinction is crucial if the child is ever to gain an understanding of the difference between facts and values, in that facts are objective and not open to argument, whereas values and opinions are subjective and may differ between people (Russell, 1982). Similarly, in order to appreciate the notion of “correctness,” the child must be able to recognize that there is “only one world against which alternative representations must be assessed” (Forguson & Gopnik, 1988, p. 239). Without standards of truth, it is easy to see why, since Piaget’s time (Piaget, 1928), young preschoolers have been described as illogical (Forguson & Gopnik, 1988).

If the arguments of the previous paragraphs are correct, then one might expect that individuals without a theory of mind would suffer severe social and cognitive problems. It is possible that such individuals do exist. A number of studies have shown that autism may well be the result of a specific deficit in the cognitive abilities involved in the construction of a theory of mind (Baron-Cohen, Leslie, & Frith, 1985, 1986; Leslie & Frith, 1988; Perner, Leslie, Frith, & Leekam, 1989). For example, Baron-Cohen, Leslie, and Frith (1986) found that, compared to mental age matched retarded and normal children, autistic children perform particularly badly on tasks that require the subject to impute intentional states to others, while they perform as well as controls on problems that require causal or simple behavioral reasoning.

THE UTILITY OF A THEORY OF MIND TO DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY

Theory of mind is becoming a valuable approach in the study of child development. It furnishes a framework for generating new research and, at the same time, for looking at various traditional issues in developmental psychology. The fertility of the approach is evident in the mass of new empirical work produced in the last few years. However, the issues that are considered in this approach have a history as long as any within developmental psychology, dating back to the earliest work of founders such as Baldwin (see Bretherton, chapter 4, this volume) and Piaget. In order to illustrate these two points, it may be instructive to glance at the history of the “theory of mind” construct.³

The modern beginnings of theory of mind research are easy to find. A clear starting point is Premack and Woodruff’s (1978) article, “Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?” published in the Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Premack and Woodruff investigated the ability of the chimpanzee to predict what a human would do in certain goal-directed circumstances, and they claimed that the animals exhibited skills that required an understanding of the mental states of the human actor. As shown in the commentaries on the article, the work generated intense interest in what would be required as firm evidence for such an understanding. That interest spread into developmental psychology, where Wimmer and Perner (1983) were the first to begin to test the issue with children, using their false belief paradigm.⁴

It did not take long for a number of correspondences and controversies to appear. Various researchers showed that a number of other developments seem to occur at about the same age as the recognition of false beliefs. The work on understanding false belief was extended to include self-knowledge. Gopnik and Astington (1988; Astington & Gopnik, 1988) showed that at about the same time children develop the understanding that other people may have beliefs that are false, they also start to recognize that they themselves may previously have had beliefs that turned out to be wrong. In addition, the recognition that objects can, in reality, be different from how they appear also shows a similar developmental progression (Flavell, Flavell, & Green, 1983; Gopnik & Astington, 1988; Moore, Pure, & Furrow, 1990). All of these developments seem to rest on the understanding that mental representations may differ from reality (Astington & Gopnik, 1988; Flavell, 1988; Forguson & Gopnik, 1988).

It soon became recognized, however, that young children do not simply have difficulty with representations that differ from reality. From about 2 years of age, children are quite capable of engaging in pretend play, or, in other words, manipulating representations that differ from the way the world is (Leslie, 1987, 1988). The apparent discrepancy between young children’s ability to pretend and their ability to pass experimental tasks such as that of Wimmer and Perner created favorable conditions for further theorizing and experimentation. Perhaps the crucial distinction that came out of this controversy was the distinction drawn most clearly by Perner (1988a), and outlined earlier, between having a representation of a representation, which pretense requires, and having a representation of a representation as a representation, or a representational theory of mind, which is required in order to recognize the existence of false beliefs.

More recently, others have claimed that false belief may not be the best way of investigating the child’s theory of mind. Wellman and his colleagues have shown that even though children younger than 4 years old may not perform successfully on false belief tasks, they do, nevertheless, have considerable knowledge about mental states and processes (Wellman, 1988). For example, 3-year-olds know that mental images of objects are different from real objects (Wellman & Estes, 1986), and they are able to predict other people’s behavior on the basis of the other’s desires (Wellman & Bartsch, 1988). Naturalistic observations reveal that children appear to be thinking and talking about mental states some time before they are successful in false belief tasks (Bretherton, McNew, & Beeghly-Smith, 1981; Shatz, Wellman, & Silber, 1983). Although such observations are always open to more reductive kinds of explanations (Perner, 1988b), they are at least suggestive of a sensitivity on the part of the young preschooler to the existence of mental life. Chandler and colleagues (Chandler et al., 1989) have criticized the apparently demanding nature of the false belief task and argued instead for deception as the criterion of understanding mental states. They have reported that 2- to 3-year-old children are capable of behaving deceptively in a novel game-playing situation. However, this result contradicts much of the rest of the available evidence on deceptive behavior in children, and, consequently, urgently requires replication for validation (e.g., Shultz & Cloghesy, 1981; Sodian, in press).

Up to this point, we have dealt only with what children know about the nature of belief. Another growing topic has been children’s understanding of how information is passed between minds and between world and mind. The study of children’s understanding of communicative efficacy has been studied at least since Piaget’s early work (Piaget, 1926) and continues to intrigue researchers (e.g., Beal, 1988; Bonit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• PREFACE
• CHAPTER 1 The Acquisition and Utility of Theories of Mind
• CHAPTER 2 The Origins of Intention in Infancy
• CHAPTER 3 The Infant’s Theory of Self-Propelled Objects
• CHAPTER 4 Intentional Communication and the Development of an Understanding of Mind
• CHAPTER 5 The Language of Emotion, the Emotions, and Nominalist Bootstrapping
• CHAPTER 6 Young Children’s Understanding of Other People: Evidence from Observations Within the Family
• CHAPTER 7 A Meeting of Minds in Infancy: Imitation and Desire
• CHAPTER 8 On Representing That: The Asymmetry Between Belief and Desire in Children’s Theory of Mind
• CHAPTER 9 Intention in the Child’s Theory of Mind
• CHAPTER 10 The Development of the Language of Belief: The Expression of Relative Certainty
• CHAPTER 11 Modelling Embedded Intention
• Author Index
• Subject Index