Lecture 5 - Children’s Theory of Mind.pdf

Lecture 5 - Children’s Theory of Mind Overview 1. Kinds of Mental state 2. When do children understand intentions? 3. When do children understand beliefs? What is theory of mind? (ToM) ToM is a complex set of skills & knowledge including: The understanding that we all have Mental States (MS) Emotio...

Lecture 5 - Children’s Theory of Mind Overview 1. Kinds of Mental state 2. When do children understand intentions? 3. When do children understand beliefs? What is theory of mind? (ToM) ToM is a complex set of skills & knowledge including: The understanding that we all have Mental States (MS) Emotions, desires, intentions and beleifs The understanding that MS drive human behaviour The unseen guides the seen - it’s an essentialist perspective (like gender conservation) The understanding that someone else’s MS are separate from your own, and so can be different from them = perspective taking Kinds of Mental State Ability to understand others’ MS is central to ToM Wellman (1990) suggests MS are acquired in a fixed order: emotions, desires/ intentions and beliefs Emotions Understanding others’ emotions begins in infancy Some emotions are visible - only MS that are; But emotions are often ambiguous and ambivalent Desires, intentions and self-control Desires = what I want Intentions = what I will do Differ Impenetrable Can conflict Always true Both these MS make a claim about you, they do not make a claim about the world = nonrepresentational mental states Beliefs Your beliefs are all the things you think are true The big stuff ‘Whether there’s a god’; small stuff & obvious stuff Beliefs can be false as they’re representations Representations make a claim about the world: so that claim can be wrong This property that makes beliefs hard for children to learn Beliefs are learnt last in Wellman’s (1990) proposal Piaget’s sensorimotor learning Control your own movements by binding together your sense and actions Piaget - Imitation This also works with someone else’s movements just making sense-action links allows infants to imitate Learning to control your own movement brings imiation Parsimonious: explains more behaviour with less theory Associative Sequence Learning (Heyes & Ray, 2000) What is Learnt? Action or intention What do infants learn when they watch adults and copy their behaviour? It seems obvious, as Piaget says, they learn actions However, as Wittgenstein noted We see actions, but we know they are the product of intentions Already said intentions, like desires, are non-representational MS But intentions, unlike desires, have moral value Why intentions are really important Intentions have moral value because we choose our intentions We are therefore responsible for them In consequence, we distinguish between actions that are intentional and those tat are accidental You are not responsible for accidental actions Adults can see an action and infer an intention from using social cues and undrstanding What about children? Meltzoff(1995) - method Do infants imitate actions of intentions? Very clever task, toddlers observe ‘failing’ actions Do toddlers imitate the failing action (which they didn’t see) or an intended action (which they didn’t)? Compare failing condition, successful condition and control condition (with no action) Tests 18-month-olds: Successful condition - saw intended action, then 80% made the intended action Failing condition - saw failing action, then 80% still made the intended action Control condition - saw no action, then only 20% made the intended action Suggests 18-month-olds are imitating intentions and not actions - in the failing condition they make an action they didn’t see Horner & Whiten (2005) Children copy both actions, over-imitate, even though the first action is irrelevant to the experimenter’s intention Children wouldn’t make 1st action if only coded intention May be children don’t code intentions but copy intentional actions - whether or not they know the intention The False Belief Task A belief’s capacity to be false sets it apart Wimmer and Perner (1983) used the False Belief Task to assess the ability to infer a false belief Ask child two questions: A false belief Question ‘where does teddy think the marble is? Tests false belief understanding A control question ‘where was the marble put first?’ Checks child remembers where the marble was Perner et al. (1987) Tested children ages 3 to 4.5 years All pass control question. FB question accuracy: 3-3.5 yrs 20% pass 3.5 to 4 yrs 60% pass 4-4.5 yrs 90% pass By 4.5 yrs, most children understand beliefs can be false When do children understand false beliefs? Does failing the False Belief task mean you don’t know about FBs? Children could know beliefs can be false but fail to work-out the right answer in the FBT Children have competence but lack performance Onishi and Baillargeon (2005) used a looking task to test infants’ understanding of false beliefs Do 15 month-old infants expect others to act in accordance with their own beliefs, even when those beliefs are false? False belief result What’s happening in the Infant task? Onishi and Baillargeon (2005) claim that infant task shows competence Fail preschool tasks through performance errors Problems with this claim… Theoretically - representing is not understanding Empirically - Heyes (2014) suggests infants don’t form meta-representations at all And finding don’t replicate when you change Onishi and Baillargeon (2005) task The 3-location false belief task Fabricius et al. (2010) added a third location: The object is never at this location 5-year-olds just as likely to pick the “object never here” location as “object was here” location: Suggests they don’t understand false beliefs at all Percpetual Access Reasoning Fabricius suggests that 5-year-olds use perceptual access reasoning If you don’t see where the object goes, you’ll give the wring answer to questions about its location So, teddy can pick any wrong location Only pass the 3-locations task at 6 to 7 years - pick where teddy last saw the object Only then do they false belief understanding Understanding FB requires “precise wrongness” PA reasoning is much easier Conclusions Humans have amazing ToM skills Evidence for ToM skills early in development But ToM is very complex and so its development is a slow, life-long process #PS406