psych 248 test Flashcards
meta-analysis of age and performance of false beliefs task, is age significant?
- yes, before age four correct answers were due to chance.
The trend in age in false belief tasks are robust and hold when type of task, whether it references self or other & salience are manipulated.
what evidence do we have of discontinuous development in child theory of mind?
All the variations of the false belief task all support the trend that 3 year olds do significantly worse than 4 year olds in this task. This suggests that 4 year olds have under gone a rapid discontinuous stage of development to gain an ability that allows them to answer this task that three years olds do not yet have.
Diverse Desires Task
Age trend in false belief tasks suggest that children before the age of 4 have no theory of mind.
The Diverse Desire Task challenges this claim and following the theory of discontinuous development theory that at age 3 they have a theory of minds, in the case that they can understand that thoughts are independent and private but they don’t yet understand they can be false or misrepresented mental states.
Diverse Desires Task Method
children are presented with a story: "Linda wants to find her cat. Her cat might be hiding in one of the bedrooms or the kitchen". Q1. (Self-Belief) where do you think the cat is? ... Okay, Linda thinks her cat is in X ... Q2. (Other-Belief) so where will Linda look for her cat?
Knowledge Access Task
Children are presented with a plain box and told Polly has never seen inside the box.
Q1. Does Polly know what is in the box?
Q- requires the child to compare to perspective their own where they can see inside the box and polly’s which they have been told stood next to the box and can not see inside it.
Hidden Emotion Task
Children are presented with an emotional story about bullying where the character hides their emotions.
Q1- what do you think sally felt?
Q2- What emotion do you think she tried to portray on her face?
If children have an understanding of hidden emotion their responses to how sally looks & feels should vary.
I.e she feels sad but looks okay
order of development of theory of mind for western urban children
Diverse Desires, Diverse Beliefs, Knowledge access, False beliefs & Hidden Emotion
Clements & Perner 1994
“Looking in Expectations”
at age four children are known to be able to verbally communicate their ability of theory of mind. Clements & Perner aimed to see although older children at age 4 have explicitly understanding of false beliefs. Is it possible to measure younger children an implicit understanding of false beliefs?
They did this by measuring eye movement of infants when completing the traditional false belief task.
Interestingly younger children’s implicit behavioural response s indicate that infants have an innate sensitivity to someone else’s false beliefs Even though they give the wrong Explicit answer. This identifies a double dissociation between implicit and explicit false belief mechanisms.
Onishi & Baillargeon (2005)
Challenge the theory that
theory of mind development is discontinuous. That its is continuous development because 7 month olds show signs of understanding false beliefs. i.e that infants are born with an innate systems that drive development of false beliefs.
Innate False belief theory model
1. familiarisation
2. belief induction: 1 in 4 conditions
i.e. true belief green (stay in green)
true belief yellow (moves from green to yellow).
false belief green (moved from green to yellow without child seeing)
false belief yellow (switched to green to yellow, it’s switched back to green).
3. test:
shown watermelon in green or yellow box.
If infants understand a particular concept then y showing them cartoon’s which adhere to that same concept they will not be surprised and be bored by it. i.e not look at it long.
When you show children a violation of expectations of a child then the child will be shocked.
Results found that eye contact was significantly higher when actor’s movements contradicted the infants false belief.
