Theory of Mind Flashcards
What did Rendell et al. define the Theory of Mind as?
“The ability to recognise that others have knowledge, thoughts and feelings apart from their own”.
Outline Meltzoff’s study.
Children watcher adults place beads into a jar.
Experimental condition - adults appeared to struggle with placing the beads in the jar.
Control condition - adults had no difficulty in placing beads into the jar.
What did Meltzoff find?
All children successfully placed the beads into the jar. Implying that the children were imitating what the adults intended to do rather than what they actually did.
What did Woodruff and Premack study and find.
Studied Chimpanzees. Found that chimps indicated to the keeper which container they wanted after they were aware of which contained the food. The chimp would discriminate between the keeper that gave her the container with the food and the keeper that didn’t.
What is the relationship between Theory of Mind and social contact?
Charman et al. identified children who had a lot of shared attention scored highly on Theory of Mind tasks.
Outline Baron-Cohen et al.’s Sally-Anne study.
- Quasi-experiment
- 20 autistic children
- 14 Down’s Syndrome children
- 27 normal children
- Researcher controlled two dolls - placed marble in basket
- Other doll moved it into a box
- Asked two control questions, “Where was the marble originally?” and “Where is the marble now?”
- Asked a critical question, “where would Sally expect to find the marble?”
What were the findings of the Sally Anne study?
Answered critical question correctly:
- 85% of normal children
- 86% of Down’s Syndrome children
- 20% of autistic children
What was concluded from the Sally-Anne study?
Autistic children could not distinguish between what they believed and what Sally believed - they lack a Theory of Mind.
Give two advantages of the Theory of Mind.
Advantage:
- High practical validity - adds to understanding of autism - however, Tager-Flusberg added that research does not support the idea that issues with the Theory of Mind are specific to autism - ToM may not be as closely linked with autism as originally envisaged.
- Supporting evidence for the modularity view of ToM - suggests that ToM is a biologically innate process which matures at fixed intervals and is not influenced by learning - studies all seem to show the ability develops around age 4 in all cultures - supporting the idea of ToM being a biological mechanism.
Give two disadvantages of the Theory of Mind.
Disadvantages:
- False belief tasks have low validity and are not a reliable measure of ToM - Bloom and German - false belief tasks require other cognitive abilities such as memory - furthermore children who perform poorly on false based task enjoy pretend play which requires an ability to recognise the mental states of others - showing a ToM.
- Flawed methodology - young children may fail to understand ToM tasks such as that used by Wimmer and Perner - because they cannot make sense of the complex questioning and language in the study - e.g. ‘Where will he look for the chocolate?’ may be interpreted as ‘Where is the chocolate?’ - like Piaget, the results are unreliable.
What is ‘Theory of Mind’?
The ability to experience and recognise the mental states, knowledge, wishes, feelings and beliefs in others. E g. ‘She looks happy’.
What is the Shared Attention Mechanism?
A more primitive version of ToM. The ability for two people to recognise they are viewing the same thing. E.g. deceiving another by hiding one’s emotions.
What did Flavell et al. find?
Children aged 3 who held a sponge designed to look like a rock called it a rock. Whereas children aged 4 called it a sponge.
Supporting the idea that to develop the ToM, the child must be able to appreciate what is false.
What did Avis and Harris find?
Children in both developed and non-developed countries developed the ability to recognise mental states in others at around the age of 4. Supporting the idea that the ToM is based on biological maturation.
