Module 5

Question 1

baby biographies

Answer 1

detailed, systematic observations of individual children. But no one had studied children’s thinking with specific tasks or theorized about how and why children’s thinking changed over time. Piaget is considered the founder of the field of cognitive development and one of the most influential psychologists of all time.

Question 2

assumption of Piaget’s theory of cognitive development

Answer 2

One of the key assumptions of Piaget’s theory of cognitive development is that children are active and motivated learners, rather than passive absorbers of information.

He viewed children as little scientists who constantly made and tested hypotheses about how the world works.

He also insisted that their knowledge and understanding is best formed though self discovery rather than explicit teaching.

For example, he once said,
“Each time one prematurely teaches a child something he could have discovered himself, that child is kept from inventing it and consequently from understanding it completely.”

This idea is known as constructivism

Question 3

constructivism

Answer 3

the idea that humans construct their own knowledge through direct experience, as opposed to being taught concepts in the abstract.

Remember that constructivism is its own set of theories that contrast with nativism and empiricism.

You might also recognize that this idea drives some approaches to education, like when students learn through problem sets, experimentation, and discussion rather than only through direct instruction.

Question 4

schemes

Answer 4

Piaget suggested that as children learn about the world, they form schemes, or mental structures.

One type of scheme is sensorimotor, meaning that it’s a tangible, physical concept, like an action.

In this example, babies might have a banging scheme where they bang an object on a table, or a sucking scheme where they suck on a soother, finger, or toy.

The second type of scheme is more abstract, because it’s a cognitive concept.

That can be something like the concept of what a dog is or what the word “tradition” means.

Question 5

assimilation

Answer 5

assimilation, children incorporate new information into their existing schemes.

Another way of saying that is that they integrate or assimilate reality into their existing views.

The new information fits what they already know, so they’ve only just expanded their set of examples that involve that scheme.

Question 6

Accommodation

Answer 6

Accommodation happens when the new information doesn’t fit the existing scheme, so the scheme must change a bit, or accommodate.

Another way of saying this is that the child has to change their views or thinking to better match reality.

Question 7

Equilibration

Answer 7

Piaget suggested that assimilation and accommodation are usually in a state of balance, or equilibrium, with the child engaging in each in equal proportions.

But every so often, the child finds that their existing schemes aren’t cutting it: the new information doesn’t fit, and so they are constantly having to accommodate their schemes, rather than being able to assimilate new information.

This means that the balance is out of whack and that their current way of thinking doesn’t work.

In order to get back into a state of equilibrium, the child must drastically change the way they think in a process called equilibration.

Piaget thought that this process happened three times during development, prompting children to move from one developmental stage to the next.

In each new stage, children were proposed to think in an entirely different way from the previous stage.

Question 8

discontinuous stages and domain general thinking

Answer 8

Piaget’s theory is a stage theory that proposes that development is discontinuous rather than gradual and continuous

Piaget also thought that each way of thinking exhibited a particular theme that cut across different areas of cognitive development, meaning that he thought that these themes were domain- general rather than specific to certain domains like language or understanding of numbers.

Piaget thought that these stages were universal, occurring in children of all cultures across all parts of the world.

Question 9

The sensorimotor stage

Answer 9

Piaget thought that children’s thinking was limited to their physical experiences in the world.

The other stages all have the word operations in them, which is the term Piaget used to refer to reversible mental actions, or the ability to perform actions on objects or on the world in your own mind.

Performing mental operations means that you can imagine things without them having to happen and perform “what if” scenarios in your head.

Birth - 2 years

lacked object permanence, the understanding that objects continue to exist when hidden.

Piaget proposed that the sensorimotor stage can be broken down into 6 substages. At first, babies only have automatic reflexes to work with.

By accidentally producing interesting outcomes, like grabbing something and then dropping it, or putting a new juicy toy in their mouth, babies start to learn how to reproduce those outcomes.

They also begin the process of gaining object permanence and being able to hold mental representations, or concepts, in their heads.

Question 10

The sensorimotor stage

basic search task

Answer 10

is done by hiding an object under something like a blanket or pillow, and waiting to see if the baby searches for it. Let’s watch this baby go through it.

Question 11

The sensorimotor stage

A-not-B error task

Answer 11

there are two hiding places instead of one.

The researcher starts by hiding a toy in location A several times and allowing the baby to retrieve it.

After a few repetitions, the researcher hides the toy in location B while the baby is watching. Babies younger than about 10 to 12 months tend to make the A-not-B error by searching in location

A, rather than location B. Piaget suggested that this is because babies do not yet have full object permanence. Instead, their representation of the object is tied to the action that they used to get it.

So in their minds, the object isn’t a concept that is distinct or separate from their previous reaching action, at least when it’s hidden.

Question 12

The preoperational stage

Answer 12

2-7 years

they have mental representations and can engage in symbolic thought.

For example, children between 2 and 7 years of age can play pretend, they can use language, which is a system of abstract symbols, and they can hold a concept in memory for an extended period.

This means that their thinking is no longer limited to what they can experience in the physical world.

On the other hand, Piaget argued that their thinking was intuitive rather than logical, and that they couldn’t yet perform reversible mental actions in their mind, or operations.

Question 13

The preoperational stage

Conservation tasks

Answer 13

test whether a child understands that certain properties like volume remain the same even after an object undergoes a transformation and now looks different.

The classic task is the conservation of liquids task. The child is shown two glasses of liquid, and the researcher confirms with the child that both glasses contain the same amount.

The researcher then pours the liquid from one glass into a taller, skinner glass in front of the child. If asked whether the two glasses have the same amount of liquid, or if one has more, a preoperational child will now say that the taller, skinner glass has more. It works with other properties too, like if you have two rows with the same number of coins and then spread one row out, the child will now think there are more coins in the spread-out row.

When asked why children think there is now more in the one case, they say things like “it’s tall” or “it’s long.”

Piaget suggested that preoperational children can’t yet perform operations, or mental actions on objects.

This means that their thinking is irreversible: they can’t imagine the liquid being poured back into the original-sized container, which would help them see that it’s the same. Instead, they exhibit centration, meaning that they focus on one aspect—in this case, the height of the liquid—while ignoring other aspects because they can’t keep both aspects in their heads at once.

Question 14

The preoperational stage

three mountains task.

Answer 14

The child is placed in front of a display that has various objects placed around it.

From any one side, the child can see some of the objects, but not all of them.

The child is first asked to describe what they see from where they’re sitting.

Next, the child is moved to another side of the display and again asked to describe what they see, while the experimenter sits in View 1: the child’s original position.

When the child is asked to describe what the experimenter sees, even though they were just sitting there a minute ago, they still describe what they are currently seeing in View 2.

This is known as egocentrism, where children have difficulty putting themselves in another person’s shoes.

Instead, they’re entirely focused on their own views and experiences.

Question 15

The concrete operations stage

Answer 15

7-11 years

Children in the concrete operations stage are less egocentric, and they can perform mental operations, passing the previous tasks. The reason the stage is called “concrete” though is because their ability to perform mental actions is limited to real-world, concrete situations. They have difficulty reasoning through abstract or hypothetical situations that don’t reflect the true state of the world. They also have difficulty with deductive reasoning, especially when it comes to abstract or hypothetical situations. This means that they have a hard time making specific conclusions from more general rules or information.

Question 16

The concrete operations stage

Feather with glass task

Answer 16

You first start with a concrete, real-world situation.

You tell the child, “Suppose this rule is true: if you hit a glass with a hammer, it will break. Johnny hit a glass with a hammer, what happened?” The child will typically answer that the glass will break because hammers are hard.

But if you repeat the same thought experiment using an abstract, hypothetical situation that doesn’t exist in the real world, children in the concrete operations stage have a hard time.

For example, you would say, “Now suppose that this rule is true: if you hit a glass with a feather, it will break. Johnny hit a glass with a feather, what happened?”

The child is likely to say that the glass won’t break because feathers are soft.

This task shows that children have difficulty taking a hypothetical, general principle and applying it to a specific situation.

Question 17

The concrete operations stage

pendulum task

Answer 17

shows that children in this stage also have problems with inductive reasoning, which is making general conclusions from data or observations.

In this task, children experiment to decide what makes a pendulum swing faster: is it the length of the string? the weight of the pendulum? the height at which the pendulum is released?

In order to solve this problem successfully, children will need to systematically test each variable by examining its effect while holding all of the others constant.

In other words, test whether the length of string makes a difference by trying different string lengths but keeping the weight and height the same, and so on.

Children will also need to systematically keep track of their findings as they go by recording them.

Children in the concrete operations stage tend to just combine different variables willy nilly, failing to attack the problem systematically and failing to write down anything they tried.

Not surprisingly, they don’t often come to the right conclusion, which is that only the length of string matters.

Question 18

The formal operations stage

Answer 18

11+ years

think like adults. They can imagine hypothetical or abstract scenarios and reason through them, and they can engage in deductive and inductive reasoning.

This makes them better problem-solvers because they can imagine various scenarios without having to try them all.

Question 19

Piagets contributions

Answer 19

Piaget was one of the main founders of the field of cognitive development, having a huge influence on our understanding of how children think and how we can help them learn.

Piaget demonstrated, for example, that children are not just little adults, but that, in fact, they think in very different ways.

Piaget also came up with a number of tasks and questions that probed children’s thinking and provided testable hypotheses that could be examined with more systematic research.

Piaget’s ideas about children’s learning also had a big impact on the field of education and are still evident in methods like discovery learning, experiential learning, or problem-based learning, where students learn through trying things rather than being told the answers.

Question 20

What we have learned since Piaget

Answer 20

One issue was that Piaget based his observations on a small number of children from a certain cultural and sociodemographic background, including his own children.

This is a particular problem given that he claimed that the stages he proposed are universal, and later research found that there are some cultural differences in terms of the ages at which children pass his tasks.

Because Piaget was limited to his own observations—those infant behavioural methods we covered in Module 1 didn’t yet exist after all— he also tended to underestimate younger children and especially infants’ understanding.

On the other hand, Piaget also overestimated how well adolescents and adults can reason, and it turns out that they aren’t always completely logical and able to think hypothetically and abstractly.

Piaget didn’t really focus on differences between individual children, especially differences that might be due to the child’s social environment or culture

Question 21

What we have learned since Piaget

horizontal décalage

Answer 21

Piaget also started to notice that development didn’t necessarily follow his strict stage-like proposal.

For example, he noticed that children tended to pass certain conservation tasks, like conservation of number, before others, like conservation of liquid.

He called this horizontal décalage, the idea that once children learn how to solve a particular problem, they don’t necessarily apply the same process or concept to other tasks.

But if children pass these tasks because they understand the concept of reversibility, or because they’re no longer centred on one aspect while ignoring others, then why don’t they pass all the tasks of the same kind at once?

Other researchers suggest that it’s because although there might be some stage-like patterns in development, it’s much more continuous than Piaget proposed.

This also means that contrary to what Piaget proposed, development is not completely domain-general.

If it were, then once children understood a certain concept like reversibility, then it should extend to tasks in different domains, like counting vs. understanding of volume.

Instead, development seems to include both domain-general and domain-specific aspects.

Question 22

Lev Vygotsky’s assumptions

Answer 22

He believed that cognitive development was inherently social, shaped by interaction with other people and influenced by the cultural context in which a child grows up.

Cultures influence how valued different cognitive activities are, what tools are available to solve problems, and what practices are used to think, solve problems, and communicate with others.

Vygotsky argued that cognitive development was like an apprenticeship, where learning occurs best when a novice is paired with someone more knowledgeable and experienced, like their parents or older siblings.

In this way, the child is learning how to think like an adult of their culture, which is a very social activity.

Individualist cultures tend to emphasize independent learning and problem-solving, like in much of North America, but collectivist cultures are more likely to emphasize collaboration and group consensus.

Question 23

zone of proximal development

Answer 23

the difference between what a child can do alone vs. what they can do with help.

The interesting space is what is in between those two points: what children can do with help.

Depending on how new they are to the task and how hard it is, they may need only a little bit of help, or they may need a lot.

Vygotsky thought that this was the prime zone for learning, and that the right amount of guidance could push children’s learning and potential to the highest point.

Question 24

Scaffolding

Answer 24

Scaffolding refers to help or guidance that is appropriate for the learner’s needs: not too much, and not too little.

A brand-new learner might need more explicit instructions and help, whereas a more experienced learner needs the adult to back off a bit and provide hints or reminders instead, when needed.

A good teacher or parent will recognize each child’s zone of proximal development and be able to provide the right amount of scaffolding to encourage learning.

Question 25

The role of language in development Private and inner speech

Answer 25

When we’re first learning something, it’s often others’ speech that guides us, telling us what to do or how things work. Vygotsky noticed that when children were still learning something, they would often talk to themselves out loud, rehearsing the steps or narrating their process. He called this private speech because it’s meant for the self. Once we become practiced at something, we turn our speech inward, either rehearsing things in our head without saying them out loud, or not having to think about it in words at all. Vygotsky called this inner speech and argued that it’s more characteristic of learners who are experienced at the task at hand.

Question 26

information processing theory

Answer 26

_{one criticism of Piaget’s theory is that it didn’t clearly specify the mechanisms of development, or how and why children’s thinking changes. The concepts of assimilation, accommodation, and equilibration are abstract and vague, and not necessarily tied to neuroscience.} suggested that the brain is kind of like a computer: you have inputs, like the keyboard and mouse, processing and ram, long term hard drive storage, and output, like what is displayed on the screen. In brain terms, input corresponds to sensory input and brief, sensory memory, processing and ram correspond to working memory and the central executive, which process information and directs attention and resources, hard drive storage corresponds to long-term memory, and output corresponds to responses and behaviour. So where does development fit in? Development might be thought of as a series of upgrades in both hardware—like storage, processing, and ram, or things like memory, attention, and speed of processing—as well as software, like the use and execution of particular strategies.

Question 27

What drives development? 1. Strategies

Answer 27

One aspect of information processing that drives development is the use of strategies: goal-directed, deliberately implemented plans to solve problems or achieve a particular outcome. Three things seem to change with age: the first is whether children use a strategy in the first place, the second is whether they use the best strategy, and the third is whether they use the best strategy effectively. In one older study, children were asked to compare two houses and decide whether they were the same or different. Most adults would say that they scan all of the windows until they see a difference, at which point they would say “different.” If they get to the end and haven’t found any differences, they say “same.” This is a good, efficient strategy, and it’s the one used by the oldest children in the study, who were over the age of 8. Six- to 8-year-olds tended to scan all or almost all of the windows each time, meaning that their strategy could work, as long as they still remembered any early differences that they saw by the time they got to the end, but it’s also a slower and less efficient strategy, because you don’t always need to scan that many windows. The youngest children, who were 4 or 5, didn’t seem to even be using a strategy, they just scanned about 5 windows on average and then made a decision. Not surprisingly, they also got the answer wrong more often.

Question 28

What drives development? 2.core executive functions

Answer 28

a set of cognitive processes called executive functions. These are high-level mental abilities that recruit the frontal cortex especially and are the last to finish developing. Most researchers agree that there are three core executive functions. The first is **working memory**, which is the ability to not only hold information in short-term memory, but to manipulate that information while it’s being held there **Inhibition** is another core aspect of executive functions. It’s the ability to ignore, or inhibit, irrelevant aspects of a stimulus, and focus on relevant aspects. A classic inhibition task is the Stroop task, where you’re supposed to ignore the printed letters and instead name the colour of the ink of each word as fast as you can. This means that you have to inhibit your automatic tendency to read the words, which is difficult and usually means that you’re slow to complete the task and you’re prone to mistakes. **Mental or cognitive flexibility** is the third important aspect, and refers to the ability to switch back and forth between two ideas or ways of thinking, or being able to think about multiple concepts at once. A classic task to measure this is the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, which uses cards that differ across multiple aspects such as shape, colour, and number of items. The participant’s job is to sort them according to one of these aspects, but they’re not told which one. Instead, they have to figure it out by guessing on each trial, and then they’re told if they sorted that card correctly or incorrectly. They’ll figure out the rule after a few guesses. Every so often, the rules of the game change and they now have to sort by a different aspect, although they’re not told when that will be. The goal is to figure out the rule change quickly and adapt by guessing the new rule.

Question 29

What drives development? 3. Higher order executive functions

Answer 29

three core areas of executive functions are thought to form the basis for three higher-order, more complex aspects of executive functions, which often recruit multiple core aspects simultaneously. These include **reasoning** and **problem-solving** These abilities allow children to tackle complex problems and they also contribute to fluid intelligence, which is similar to non-verbal intelligence. This is an example from an intelligence test called Raven’s Progressive Matrices, which measures abstract reasoning. You have to figure out which item in the lowest two rows fits the pattern in the upper box. **Planning**, or the ability to think ahead and plan the steps required to move toward a goal, is another higher-order aspect of executive functions. The Tower of Hanoi or Tower of London tasks are good examples of planning tasks. Here, we have three rods with different- sized rings on them. The task is to move the whole tower over to the third peg in as few moves as possible. The catch is that you can only move one ring at a time, and you can never place a larger ring on top of a smaller ring.

Question 30

What drives development? 4. Automatic processing

Answer 30

Information is also easier to process when some processes become automatic. This means that you no longer have to think about them. A good example is reading short, frequently encountered words. Because you have spent so much time reading, you’ve become somewhat of an expert at it. As some processing becomes more automatic, there are more brain resources leftover to do other, more complex things.

Question 31

What drives development? 5. Processing speed

Answer 31

which is also related to how much mental effort you have to put in to doing something. Fast processing usually means that a task is easy and you don’t have to devote much effort to it, but slow processing is effortful. This symbol search task is a common one to measure processing speed. There is a shape in a black square on each line, and the task is to decide whether that exact same shape exists in the rest of that line, or if it’s missing. If it’s there, you’re supposed to draw a line through the match, like in the second, third, fourth, and last line. If it’s not there, you’re supposed to draw a line through the question mark, like in the first and fifth line. Obviously, the goal is to go through these as fast as you can, and the test measures how many you get through in a set time limit. That’s a measure of processing speed. Remember that myelination is continuing to happen in children and adolescents’ brains, speeding up neural processing. This is probably a big reason why processing speed improves with age. When kids are able to process information faster, they can move on to processing other more complex things, or they can process overall more information in the same amount of time, improving their performance on many cognitive tasks.

Question 32

Noam Chomsky and Piagets lackings

Answer 32

thought that infants were born with some innate knowledge of grammar. Remember that one big criticism of Piaget’s theory was that he really underestimated the capabilities of young children and especially infants. Once researchers started studying infants more thoroughly and developed procedures that could get at their understanding, they found that babies could understand way more than was originally thought. This led some researchers to propose that infants may possess innate knowledge, or at least the capacity to gain that knowledge with very little experience, in certain core domains.

Question 33

core knowledge theory

Answer 33

Elizabeth Spelke is a contemporary researcher who has proposed core knowledge theory: the idea that infants are naive theorists who are born with a handful of separate knowledge systems, which experience then builds on. This means that they understand some basic things about how objects behave in the world, and how that differs from how beings like humans and animals—who have agency or the ability to achieve an intended goal—behave in the world. They also have a rudimentary understanding of numbers, including basic addition and subtraction, and of geometry and space, like distance and angle. A more recently proposed “us vs. them” fifth core system predisposes infants to categorize people as either part of their own social group or a different group, and to favour their own group.

Question 34

violation of expectation procedure

Answer 34

Similar to the habituation procedure, infants are first habituated to a display, like a flat, rectangular drawbridge rotating back and forth, shown from the side view in this figure. Once infants are habituated, a box is placed in the path of the rotating drawbridge, shown by the brown box in panel B. In the test phase, infants are either shown a possible event, such as when the drawbridge stops at the point where it hits the box, or an impossible event, when the drawbridge continues to rotate as if the box wasn’t even there. In reality, the device has a trap door that the box moves down into, resurfacing when the drawbridge rotates back toward the infant. In any case, it probably looks like a magic trick to infants. The key measure is whether infants look longer at the impossible event, which should be surprising, compared to the possible event.

Question 35

What violation of expectation procedure suggests about infants’ knowledge of objects

Answer 35

If infants behave this way, think about what it suggests about their knowledge of objects. First, it probably means that they have some concept of object permanence, because they’d have to understand that the box still exists when the drawbridge rotates up and blocks its view. Second, they’d need to understand that solid objects can’t pass through other solid objects: that if the drawbridge hits the block, it shouldn’t be able to continue rotating. Five-month-old infants looked longer at the impossible event, which is three months earlier than when they pass Piaget’s basic search task. In a different study using a rolling cart, infants as young as as 3.5 months passed the test, and the next video shows this task in action. Because infants seem to have this sophisticated knowledge much earlier than Piaget thought, and before they could have acquired much experience, core knowledge theorists proposed that some of this knowledge must be built-in.

Question 36

Violation of expectation procedure and understanding of numbers

Answer 36

Studies also suggest that infants have some concept of number, or quantity, at least up to about 3 or 4 objects. This research even shows that infants can keep track of objects as they’re added or subtracted, suggesting they can do very simple, baby math. In one classic study, Karen Wynn habituated infants to either one or two Mickey Mouse dolls on a stage. In the test, phase, babies were shown a basic addition task. One Mickey Mouse doll was placed on the stage, and then a screen came up to hide the doll from view. While the babies were watching, a second Mickey Mouse doll came in from the side and was placed behind the screen. In the possible outcome, the screen dropped to reveal two Mickey Mouse dolls, as expected, but in the impossible event, only one doll was there. Five-month-olds looked longer at the impossible event, suggesting that not only do they have object permanence, since they’d need to keep the Mickey Mouse dolls in their minds once they were covered by the screen, but also that they could perform basic addition and have some basic conception of numbers like “one” and “two.”

Question 37

Core knowledge theory: Contributions and criticisms

Answer 37

Core knowledge theorists argue that sophisticated knowledge can be observed at such a young age that babies must come equipped with some of that knowledge from the beginning, or else their brain is wired to give them a head start in acquiring that knowledge with very little experience. Unlike some other nativist theories, they don’t suggest that babies are born with all kinds of different knowledge modules, but instead, that there are a small number of core domains, and that experience builds on that head start. Critics of core knowledge theory argue that many findings can be explained by more basic perceptual processes, or that knowledge is acquired much more gradually with increasing experience rather than being built-in. There is some pretty convincing evidence for the role of experience in shaping these abilities, and we can’t forget that a lot of learning can take place in the first few months of life, and even in utero, before the baby is even born. Other critics have argued that this kind of knowledge is too complex to be coded for in our genes, and that we simply don’t have enough DNA to code for things as specific as a complex neural network with a particular set of synapses. Either way, core knowledge theorists have contributed a lot to our understanding of what infants can do and they provided a whole new set of tools and procedures to work with to investigate things like the impact of experience. The debate about how much infants know from the beginning is ongoing.

Question 38

theory of mind

Answer 38

Another area of cognition that was originally thought to be built in is theory of mind: the understanding that people can have desires, beliefs, knowledge, and mental states that are different from our own. Theory of mind is the ability to understand how minds work and that they’re not just a direct reflection of reality.

Question 39

theory of mind: false belief task

Answer 39

A classic task to measure theory of mind is the false belief task, where one character in a story is led to believe something that isn’t true. The Sally-Anne task, named after the characters of the story, is the original example. Preschool-aged children are introduced to two characters: one named Sally, who has a basket, and one named Anne, who has a box. Children are told that Sally has a marble that she places into her basket. She then leaves to go for a walk. Anne takes the marble out of the basket and puts it into the box while Sally is gone. In this way, children know where the marble really is, but the test is trying to see if they understand that Sally does not. When Sally comes back and wants to play with her marble, children are asked a question like, “Where will Sally look for her marble?” or “Where does Sally think her marble is?”. Very consistently across countries and cultures, children tend to pass this task at 4 years of age, stating that Sally should look in her basket. Children younger than 4 seem to think that because they know it’s really in the box, everyone knows that it’s there too.

Question 40

theory of mind: false belief task and autism

Answer 40

Because of the consistent timeline at which children pass this task, and the fact that children with autism spectrum disorder tend to struggle specifically with this task because they have difficulties understanding social situations, researchers originally proposed that it must be another built-in knowledge system that came online or was activated at about 4 years of age, and was missing or impaired in children with autism.

Question 41

Gradual development of theory and of mind Violation of expectation study

Answer 41

later research revealed that theory of mind might be acquired more gradually than previously expected. For example, when a violation of expectation task is used instead of a verbal task, infants as young as 13 months old demonstrate some understanding of false beliefs. In the original study that tested 15-month-olds, infants watched an actor hide a watermelon toy in one of two boxes and then leave. The watermelon then moved over to the other box. In the ”possible” test trial, the actor came back and searched for the toy in the box she had originally placed it in, and in the ”impossible event,” she looked in the new box where the toy was actually hiding. Infants looked longer when she looked in the new location, suggesting that they expected her to look in the place where she originally hid it. Pretty sophisticated for a child just over the age of one!

Question 42

Gradual development of theory and of mind Children’s understanding of desires rather than beliefs or knowledge

Answer 42

In another study examining children’s understanding of desires rather than beliefs or knowledge, a researcher expressed liking for broccoli and disgust for goldfish crackers, which is the opposite of what most kids like. She then held out her hand and asked the child to give her some of what she liked. Fourteen-month-olds tended to give her the crackers, suggesting they didn’t appreciate that other people could like different things from themselves. But 18-month-olds gave her the broccoli, even though they might have thought that she was a bit of a weirdo. They seemed to appreciate that people can like different things. What these studies suggest is that theory of mind may be acquired more gradually than originally thought, and that passing the task might depend on the task demands. Classic false belief tasks rely heavily on language, for example, whereas the broccoli/cracker test doesn’t require the child to speak, and the watermelon toy task doesn’t require any language at all.