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PSYC21021/ Topics in Developmental Psychology > Lecture 9 > Flashcards

Lecture 9 Flashcards

Theory of mind

1
Q

what is the theory of mind for?

A
  • our everyday understanding of people is mentalistic, we think of them in terms of their beliefs, goals and feelings etc.
  • we expect people to act in accordance with their goals + beliefs -> coherence
  • however mental states are invisible - so how do chilldren learn about others?
  • theory of mind is proposed to explain the acquisition process and development
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2
Q

theory of mind

A
  • understanding the mental states of psychological states of others
  • perspective-taking, putting oneself in the shoes of others
  • mind-reading
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3
Q

mental states

A
  • goals/intentions and desires
  • understanding perception and knowledge ‘access’
  • beliefs or representations of the world or reality
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4
Q

goals/intentions and desires

A
  • people act in accordance with their goals
  • people with different goals act differently
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5
Q

understanding perception and knowledge ‘access’

A
  • visual perspective-taking: can others see what i can see?
  • ‘seeing’ is not necessarily the same thing as ‘knowing’
  • children understand this
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6
Q

beliefs or representations of the world or reality

A
  • true-belief: correctly represent the world
  • ignorance: unaware of reality
  • false-belief: incorrectly represent the reality
  • second-order beliefs: beliefs about beliefs
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7
Q

goals and intentions as a mental state - do children understand this? - evidence

A
  • unsuccessful actions allow us to explore goals of agents
  • Behne et al. 2005
  • 6,9,13 and 18 mo olds
  • children watch adult fail to hand infants a toy
  • unwilling condition: adult teases infant or plays with toy herself
  • unable condition: adult tries but drops toy so can’t give it to infant
  • 9 mo + were more impatient or frustrated in the unwilling condition
  • infants adapted their response to how they infer the goals of experimenter
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8
Q

desires evidence

A
  • children often assume everybody likes what they like and everybody dislikes what they like
  • when adults express they like something they child doesn’t like, children cannot perceive before age 2 that other people have different desires and hand them the thing they like (goldfish vs. broccoli)
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9
Q

beliefs: true vs false

A
  • people act on their beliefs
  • but what they believe may not always correspond to reality: false belief
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10
Q

false belief tasks

A

asses whether children can recognize that people would have multiple representations of one situations
- provide evidence for children being able to make the distinction between mind and world (belief vs reality)

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11
Q

unexpected location task: Wimmer and Perner 1983

A

false belief task
- Maxi puts chocolate in cupboard, mum moves it to drawer, where will Maxi look for chocolate?

  • 3 yr olds answered drawer, incorrectly, where the chocolate really is. Show understanding that we act on our beliefs and knowledge about the world
  • 4-5 yr olds answered cupboards, understanding that Maxi believes his chocolate to be there, even if it is not correct (understand false belief)
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12
Q

unexpected contents task - Perner 1987

A

false belief task
- smarties task
- box filled with pencils instead
- at age 3 children do not understand that another person could have a false-belief about the world
- think someone else would think there are also pencils in the box, despite them not having been shown, 4 year olds think other person would believe its smarties

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13
Q

Implicit ToM

A

being able to track others’ mental state unconsciously
- done with children younger than 3 / infants
- focused on looking times are measured

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14
Q

explicit ToM

A

more conscious tracking of other’s mental states measured by standard false belief tasks
- interviews with 3-5 yr olds, correct answers

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15
Q

different models explaining ToM

A
  • conceptual change model
  • competence model
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16
Q

Conceptual change model

A
  • Perner 1983
  • Children’s early ToM equates to desire psychology: based on a persons understanding based on the internal states of goals/intentions/perception and knowledge access
  • development after age 3 represent a shift from a situation/reality-based to a representation-based understanding of the world
  • explains how children go from belief equates reality to belief equates to an internal reality (or representation of reality in someone’s mind)
17
Q

competence models

A

criticize false belief tasks, they underestimate young children’s abilities because of task demands

  • task complexity: requires verbal, memory, attention, counterfactual thinking and depends on wording of questions: too difficult for 3 year olds
  • reason for displacement: deception: what is the point/goal of the protagonist/action?
  • executive function: inability to inhibit the knowledge of reality at age 3.
18
Q

wording of the question

A
  • maybe children don’t follow what the experimenter meant…
    e.g. should or think or say all have different meanings
19
Q

deception

A

Chandler, Fritz & Hala
- for deception to work we need to assume partner will act on false belief
- hide-and-seek game
- child is involved in narrative
- if the other person can’t find the toy they win
- children age 5 and up came up with deceptive strategies in order to win (goal)
- improved performance on understanding false belief tasks

20
Q

Inhibitory control

A

inhibitory control is the ability to suppress actions or thoughts that are relevant to task at hand

21
Q

Inhibitory control: executive function

A
  • false belief tasks require children to inhibit their knowledge about false reality
  • inhibitory control developed in preschool years
  • can be difficult for 3 year olds to ignore what they know about objective reality
  • better at age 5 which is when they can judge who would or would not know about an object being moved to a new location (think max and chocolate task)
22
Q

active behavioural paradigm

A

Buttelmann, Carpenter, & Tomasello
- infants help and adult achieve his goal, but to determine the goal infants had to take into account what the adult believed (whether or not he falsely believed there was a toy in the box)
- at 18 mo infants successfully took into account the adult’s belief in the process of attempting to determine his goal

23
Q

implicit false belief tasks

A

Onishi & Baillergeon
- 15 mo olds
- nonverbal ‘violation of expectation’ paradigm: looking longer at the surprising scene
- if something is interesting, children pay more attention e.g. toy is not in the box they expected
- so they understand that people with false beliefs act in accordance to this and pay attention to it

24
Q

conclusion on false belief tasks

A
  • some paradigms suggest that when children receive enough scaffolding, their performance improves in false belief tasks
  • however, with some exceptions, the performance of 3-year-olds seems quite unstable and the age differences persist
  • therefore, there seem to be significant developmental change ‘conceptual change’ between age 3-5
25
Q

beyond false belief tasks

A
  • children can acknowledge their own false beliefs, seen in naturalistic settings: ‘ i thought i saw a cat, but it was a dog’
  • individual differences:
  • correlated with executive function, linguistic skills
  • early family conversation
  • pretend pay and ToM
  • siblings may causes earlier understanding of false beliefs
26
Q

is ToM a universal ability

A
  • false-belief tasks are not suitable for all cultures (mostly ok for WEIRD)
  • in some it is against social norms to talk about mental state
  • some languages make more fine-tuned distinctions in mental state verbs than others
  • children master ‘mental states’ reasoning sooner but depends on cultural communities, language systems where they grow up, but they all develop the same to acquire this ability (but at different ages)
  • so universal aspect of ToM is children all follow the same progression: understand goals, then preferences, the visible things they know and then finally belief understanding.
27
Q

is ToM uniquely-human

A
  • primates can perceive others as goal-orientated
  • they are able to track what is visually available to others (‘what they know’)
  • they expect others to act on false beliefs (implicit ToM)
  • but in behavioural experiment they show no false belief understanding so no evidence for explicit ToM
28
Q

what is the most common measure of ToM

A

false belief tasks

29
Q
A

PSYC21021/ Topics in Developmental Psychology (9 decks)

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