Conceptual Development

Question 1

What is conceptual development?

Answer 1

Concepts are general ideas that can be used to group together objects, events, qualities or other aspects of the world on the basis of some similarity or theory

• help us make sense of world
• allow us to generalise from past experiences
• prime our emotional reactions

Question 2

Define Theory of Mind

Answer 2

• Sophisticated ability to explain, predict and interpret people’s behaviour by attributing mental states to self and others
• Requires evidence that judgements are based on invisible mental states, not the state of the real world

Question 3

What is the ‘Maxi Test’?(Wimmer & Perner, 1983)

Answer 3

Test to measure childrens’ Theory of Mind

Question 4

How do children pass the ‘Maxi test’?

Answer 4

Children need to understand:

• Another person can have a false belief about the state of the world
• Behaviour is explained by a person’s beliefs rather than reality

Question 5

What were the results of the ‘Maxi test’?

Answer 5

Most 3y.o.s fail
Some 4-5 y.o.s pass
Nearly all 6-9 y.o.s pass

Question 6

What was the scenario used in the ‘Maxi test’?

Answer 6

Scenario was acted out to children using dolls and matchboxes:

• Max puts his chocolate in the green cupboard
• Max goes to the playground
• Max’s mum moves chocolate to the blue cupboard
• Mum goes out to garden
• Max comes home, wants his chocolate
• Where will max look for his chocolate?

Question 7

What does the Unexpected Contents (Smarties Test) demonstrate to children?

Answer 7

That their own beliefs can be false (known as False Beliefs)

Question 8

What happens in the Unexpected Contents (Smarties Test)? Gopnik & Astington (1988)

Answer 8

1. Show child closed smarties tube, ask ‘What’s inside’?
2. Reveal pencils inside tube - child is surprised
3. When mum comes in, what will she think is in the tube?
4. <4yrs old: ‘pencils!’
   >4yrs old: ‘smarties!’

Question 9

What do cross-cultural studies show about False Beliefs?

Answer 9

Appears to be a universal developmental change that occurs between 3-5 years.
- Similar numbers of children pass & fail false belief tasks across cultures

Question 10

What happens in the Appearance-Reality test? (Flavell et al., 1983)

Answer 10

1. Research asks: ‘when you look at this with your eyes right now, what does it look like?’
2. Child replies: ‘a rock!’
3. Research squeezes fake rock and hands it to child to squeeze
4. Researcher asks: ‘What is it really? Is it really a rock or really a sponge?’ ‘When you look at this with your eyes right now, does it look like a rock or a sponge?’

Question 11

What can be used to measure children’s’ ToM?

Answer 11

‘Maxi test’
Unexpected Contents / Smarties Test
Appearance-Reality Test
Second-order false belief task (later ToM)

Question 12

How do children pass the Appearance-Reality test? (Flavell et al., 1983)

Answer 12

• Hold two different mental representations of an object

- Understand that they can have a belief that differs from the true state of the world

Question 13

What object is used in the Appearance-Reality test? (Flavell et al., 1983)

Answer 13

A sponge that looks like a rock

Question 14

What are the results of the Appearance-Reality test? (Flavell et al., 1983)

Answer 14

Most 3yr olds fail
- Answer It’s a sponge! to both test questions, despite saying it looked like a rock at start
Most 4 & 5 yr olds pass

Question 15

What story is used in the Second-order false belief task? (Perner & Wimmer, 1985)

Answer 15

• John & Mary want to buy an ice cream from the ice cream van in the park
• Mary hasn’t got any money
• Ice cream man says he will be there all day so Mary can come back later with money, so Mary goes home
• Ice cream man tells John he’s going to the church because there aren’t many people in park
• Ice cream man drives past Mary’s house & tells her he is going to the church
• Mary goes to church to buy an ice cream
• John goes to Mary’s & Mary’s mum says she went to get an ice cream
• Where does John think Mary went to get the ice cream?

Question 16

How do children pass the second-order false belief task? (Perner & Wimmer, 1985)

Answer 16

• Reason about the mental states of two other people

- Understand that a second person can have beliefs about a third person’s beliefs, and those beliefs may be false

Question 17

How old does a child typically need to be to pass the second-order false belief task?

Answer 17

7-8 years old

Question 18

When do Higher-order beliefs develop? (ToM)

Answer 18

From middle childhood onwards

Question 19

What is meant by Higher-order beliefs? (ToM)

Answer 19

• Taking into account beliefs, desires, intentions, personality, attitudes, and social scripts when interpreting actions
• Also begin to understand that two people can interpret the same situation in different ways for valid reasons

Question 20

How can knowledge of reality affect a person’s results in a ToM test?

Answer 20

• Can result in adults’ ‘failing’ the false belief task

- So failure on ToM tasks does not necessarily mean an absence of theory of mind

Question 21

What are the precursors to ToM?

Answer 21

• Perceptually-based awareness
• Desire-based reasoning
• Pretend play
• Deception
• Talk about belief

Question 22

What happens to your perceptually-based awareness of others at ages 18m, 24m, 30m?

Answer 22

18months: can follow another’s gaze to find hidden objects
24months: interpret another’s request based on an understanding of what the other person can and cannot see (Moll & Tomasello, 2006)
30months: take into account what another person has seen or not seen in the past (O’Neill, 1996)

Question 23

What is the Violation of Expectation method? (Onishi & Bailargeon, 2005)

Answer 23

• A non-verbal unexpected location test

- Used to measure a perceptually-based precursor to false belief understanding

Question 24

What happens in the Violation of Expectation method experiment? (Onishi & Bailargeon, 2005)

Answer 24

In the TB-yellow condition:
- Woman watches toy move from dark to light box
In the FB-yellow condition:
- Woman watches toy move from dark to light box but doesn’t see it move back to dark box

Question 25

What were the results of the Violation of Expectation method? (Onishi & Bailargeon, 2005)

Answer 25

• 15-month-olds seems to expect woman to reach into the box where the woman last saw the toy
• Look longer when woman reaches into the other box indicating surprise

Question 26

Why are desires easier to understand than beliefs?

Answer 26

Because desires can be interpreted from the person’s actions.

• desires cause people to act in certain ways; can be fulfilled or unfulfilled
• beliefs are interpreted in relation to events in the world; either true or false

Question 27

At what age do infants understand that people’s desires guide their actions?

Answer 27

12 months

Question 28

At what age do infants understand that desires guide actions, even if other’s desires don’t match their own?

Answer 28

18 months

Question 29

What happened in the Food sharing experiment? (Repacholi & Gopnik, 1997)

Answer 29

• Experiment expresses disgust or delight to different foods
• Ask child to “give me some food”
• 18-months-old, but not 14-months-olds, understand that a person’s desired food can differ from their own

Question 30

What do children need to do in order to deceive?

Answer 30

Children need to manipulate events to lead others into false beliefs
- 3 year-olds are able to deceive adults by masking their emotional expressions (Lewis, Stanger & Sullivan, 1989)

Question 31

What happened in the Hidden treasure study? (Chandler, Fritz & Hala, 1989) (Deception)

Answer 31

• Hide and seek board game

- Even 2.5 year olds engaged in various deceptive strategies such as wiping away footprints, laying false trails

Question 32

What are the Empiricist explanations (nurture) for the development of theory of mind?

Answer 32

1. Develops from experiences with other people
   - Pre-schoolers with siblings do better on false belief tasks than only children
   - Superior ToM performance when parents engage in more joint attention activities and conversations about mental states
2. Develops alongside information processing abilities
   - ToM performance correlates with other cognitive skills (executive functioning) such as reasoning about counterfactual statements and inhibition of behavioural inclinations

Question 33

What are the Nativist explanations (nature) for the development of theory of mind?

Answer 33

• Naive psychological understanding from birth
• Theory of Mind Module (ToMM) in the brain matures over the first 5 years
• ToMM interprets people’s behaviour and produces representations of their beliefs and desires
• A controversial idea
  Evidence:
• Brain imagine studies - but small samples, hard to interpret
• Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) - impaired performance on theory of mind tests and impaired social skills; but doesn’t explain other characteristics of ASD

Question 34

What did Ricard and Allard (1993) find in relation to children’s conceptual development of people and other animals?

Answer 34

9- to 10- months-old infants 
Behaved differently in different conditions: 
- Approach and touch the toy & rabbit 
- Smile at the person 
- Attend more to person and rabbit

Question 35

What are the three general categories of objects that are understood from infancy?

Answer 35

Inanimate objects
Animals
People

Question 36

What are the concepts that allow infants to understand the three general categories of things?

Answer 36

Inanimate objects
- no self-propelled movement 
Animals 
- Eat, drink, grow, breath, move 
People 
- seen as animals but also 'similar to me'

Question 37

What are categories typically based on?

Answer 37

Similarity of appearance