What is Theory of mind?
The ability to understand that other people have mental states- such as beliefs, desires, intentions, knowledge, and emotions- that may be different from one’s own, and to use this understanding to interpret and predict their behavior
Others can have other beliefs, even false beliefs
Cornerstone for cognition
Precursors of the theory of mind with naive psychology
Consistently keeping track of what people know, think
Not present at birth in its full form
What is naive psychology?
A commonsense level of understanding of other people and oneself
Three constructs that people commonly use to understand human behavior:
Desires
Beliefs
Actions
Naive psychology in the first year of life
Statistical learning
Intention
Joint attention
Social referencing
Intersubjectivity
Lack of theory of mind
Attributing Dispositional States Study
Procedure:
Infants watched a film that adults interpret as a ball “trying and failing” to get up a hill as it is being “helped” by a triangle and being “blocked” by a square
Subsequently, with just three shapes on the screen, infants’ looking behavior indicated that they expected the ball to approach the helpful triangle while avoiding the hindering square
Given the choice to reach the yellow square and green triangle, they will reach for the one helping the ball and look more if the ball goes up to the hinder since they expect the ball to go up the helper
Findings:
Twelve-month-olds also seem able, like adults to attribute dispositional states
Naive Psychology in the Second Year
Sense of self is developing
Pretend play is emerging
Differentiating own preferences from others
What is play?
Activities that are pursued for their own sake, with no motivation other than the enjoyment they bring
What is pretend play?
Make-believe activities in which children create new symbolic relations, acting as if they were in a situation different from their actual one
Emerges around 18 months of age
May cause improved social understanding
Pretend play enhances social, intellectual, and emotional development
The amount of time spent in pretend play with others at 33 months is positively correlated with their comprehension of the emotions of others at 40 months
What is sociodramatic play?
Activities in which children enact miniature dramas with other children or adults
Taste Preference Study
The child chooses the snack they like
Then the experimenter chooses the opposite snack and demonstrates they have the opposite preference with oohs and ahhs (gold fish vs broccoli)
Then ask if they can have some
14 month olds give the experimenter their own preference (goldfish)
18 month old give the experimenter their preferred snack (broccoli)
What is the false-belief problems?
Tasks that test a child’s understanding that other people will act in accord with their own beliefs even when the child knows that those beliefs are incorrect
The Smarties Task
Aim: Tests the theory of mind
Procedures:
Ask the child what is in the container of Smarties. They would say Smarties/candy.
Then open it and show them what is inside, and there are pencils.
After you close it and ask the child, “When I first showed you the tube, before we took the lid off, what did you think was in here?”
The child would say that they thought the pencils were there before, even though in reality, they thought it was candy
Then ask them about another person. “Your friend Sam is outside. If I show him the tube, what will he think is inside?”
The child would say that Sam would say that there are pencils in the Smarties container, since they cannot comprehend that others do not know the same information as they have
The child is sure the other person will know what is in the container
The majority of 3 years olds fail, 4-year-olds pass
Mean vs Nice Puppet Task
Procedure:
The child is told information about the mean puppet and the nice puppet
This mean puppet always wants the same sticker you want
The nice puppet will get the other sticker that you do not want
Findings:
3 year old cannot deceive the mean puppet the sticker to get the sticker they want by lying/deceiving puppet
The 5-year-old puppet can deceive the mean puppet from the beginning
The 4-year-old puppet will have had time in the beginning but then learn to deceive the mean puppet
What is the nativists’ perspective on naive psychology?
Early understanding is possible because children born with basic understanding of human psychology
What is the empiricists’ perspective on naive psychology?
Experiences with other people and general information-processing capacities are key sources of early understanding of other people
What is the nativist’s perspective on where the theory of mind comes from?
There is a theory of mind module approach that hypothesizes that a brain mechanism is devoted to understanding others and that the TOMM matures over the first five years of life
Specific domain
What is the evidence for the nativist’s perspective on theory of mind?
Infants show early precursors
Children with autism have a biologically impaired TOMM
There are precursors in animals
Specialized brain areas for TOMM
Not one specific, more distributed neural network
The temporo-parietal junction and the frontal cortex are important for processing social information
What is the nativist perspective of Autism?
Hypothesis: Autism is a failure in the development of TOMM
Autistic children show
less joint attention behaviors
Less gaze monitoring
Less protodeclarative point gestures- but they do point for other purposes
When matched for chronological age, autistic kids do much worse on false beliefs tasks than kids with Down syndrome and those who are blind
What is the false photo test?
Children showed a Polaroid camera
A photo of a room with a teddy bear in one location is taken
The teddy bear is moved and asked where the teddy bear is going to be
Autistic children will pass this test since it does not have to think about other minds
Has a specific difficulty representing mental states, but physical representations
Implications Autism is not a single theory of mind module impairment but perceptual/attentional differences affecting
What is the empiricists’ perspective on where the theory of mind comes from?
Emphasizes the growth of general information-processing skills as essential to understanding other people’s minds
General cognitive activities are progressing
What is evidence for the empiricists’ perspective on theory of mind?
Reducing inhibitory demands shows improvement in the task testing theory of mind
Counterfactual reasoning correlates with success in the theory of mind tasks
Reducing performance demands
Hindsight bias
Look First procedure
Sally put her marble in the basket.
Sally goes away
Ann moves the marble
Sally comes back. Where will Sally look for her marble?
Where was the marble in the beginning?
Where is the marble now?
This question demonstrates that children not having Theory of Mind
Where will Sally look first for her marble?
Question Improves the performance of 3 year old
Shows some demand characteristics with the testing task
What is counterfactual reasoning?
The cognitive process of imagining alternatives to past events
Getting better in counterfactual reasoning correlates with success in theory of mind tasks
Posting Procedure of Smarties Task
You have children draw the Smarties container in a postcard and put in a mail box before showing the children what is inside the Smarties container
The children are better able to solve the task
T
his makes the representation more salient, and are better able to remember that they had a different idea from reality
What is the interactionists’ perspective on where the theory of mind comes from?
Interactions with other people are crucial for developing a theory of mind
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Chapter 1 Lecture38
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Chapter 1 Textbook45
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Chapter 2 Teratogens Lecture22
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Lesson 2.1 Textbook33
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Prenatal Learning Lecture13
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Chapter 2.2, 2.3, 2.4 Textbook19
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Ch 2. The Newborn Lecture13
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Chapter 3 Nature and Nurture Lecture57
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Chapter 3 Textbook47
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Chapter 4 Piaget Lecture21
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Chapter 4 Textbook9
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Chapter 4 Information-Processing Theory & Dynamic Systems Lecture18
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Chapter 4: Sociocultural Theories17
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Chapter 4 Core Knowledge Theories10
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Chapter 5 Perceptual Development46
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Chapter 5 Learning21
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Chapter 5 Motor Development17
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Chapter 6: Language Development45
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Chapter 6: Theories of Language Development28
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Chapter 7: Conceptual Development46
