DEV PSYC - Theory of mind Flashcards
What is theory of mind
The attribution of mental states to individuals
- usually we mean other individuals, but introspection
Its the attribution of intentions and beliefs, desires, emotions
What is a classical illustartion of how readily humans attribute beliefs, desires and intentions?
Heider & Simmel (1944)
What were piaget claim about children lacking perspective (before 7 years)
The three mountains task
“Describe what the doll sees”
Later versions of the task with small alterations proved possible even for three year olds
In fact, even animals such as some birds are capable
What was the false belief experiment?
The classic Sally-Ann task: change-of-location (unexpected transfer) paradigm.
By roughly four-years-old most children pass this task, but before then consistently fail.
Sally-Anne is unexpected location (or location transfer). Another paradigm is unexpected contents.
“What’s in the tube?”
Participant will answer “Sweets”.
Participant shown there are actually pencils.
“What will your mother think is in the tube?”
Before 3 or 4, children will tend to answer “Pencils”.
“What did you think was in the tube before I showed you?”
Failure in understanding own mind is correlated with failure to correctly ascribe false belief to others.
What is the big deal about false belief?
False belief understanding uniquely allows us to separate the subject’s knowledge of the world from their knowledge of others’ knowledge of the world.
That’s on a much higher level of cognitive complexity.
Talk about the False belief attribution i 15-month-olds:
- Infants familiarised to adult handling object in one box.
- Object moved. For some infants, adult present (true belief condition). For other infants, adult absent (false belief condition).
- Infants see the adult search where the objects was or was not.
In both conditions, infants looked longer when the adult searched where the adult believed the object was not located.
What were the conclusions from the 18 month old children study on false belief
18-month-olds reveal false-belief understanding in a task which is:
Unexpected contents paradigm, not unexpected location transfer
The mechanism is general
Method not based on sneakiness
Important because it has been suggested that a context of deception focuses the mind on mental states, making ToM tasks easier
Based on an active helping paradigm, rather than looking
Important because indicates that understanding is not so implicit that it cannot motivate active behaviour
Explain the evidence for an automatic implicit system (false belief)
Adults react faster to the ball that shouldn’t be there when another agent believes it should be.
Adults were not asked to consider the agent’s belief, but they have anyway automatically encoded it and this encoding primes their response.
Theory of mind tasks: explain the results from bilingual three year olds:
Bilingual three-year-olds outperformed monolinguals on both standard and special bilingual task where success relies on knowing who understand what language.
