Theory of mind Flashcards
Theory of mind
understand another’s perspective including affective and cognitive (infer mental states thoughts and feeling of self and others)
two orders of theory of mind
1st-anothers mental state 2nd- infer ones mental state about anothers
Brain areas involved with ToM
mentalising network
Prerequisite for ToM and what dose ToM lead to
joint attention
empathy and morality
ToM impacts in children
friendships, lying, persuasion/arguments, learning and acceptance of feedback
sequence of ToM
Diverse desires, Diverse beliefs, Knowledge access, false-belief and hidden emotion
cultural differences in sequence
ka acquired before db (chinese)
what can lead to delayed development
deafness and autism
Mental states
Unobservable, unique and content rich
Beginnings of theory of mind
Premack and Woodruff- chimpanzees watch actors try to reach banana. chimps can discriminate between photos of success so have mental states
Maxi task
Wimmer and Perner children detect false beliefs 0% 3-4 year olds compared to majority of 6-9
Sally-Anne task
Baron-Cohen- majority of 4.5 year olds above chance compared to autism
Smarties task
Perner, Leekam and Wimmer- actually pencils. Asked about own belief before and what others beliefs would be. Better at others beliefs then self with a big jump at 4
Theory-theorists
naïve theories of how world work. conceptual changes effect how understand mind. catalytic change to develop theory of mind. domain general and not innate
Wellman’s theory-theorist
reasoning about desire to belief reasoning (3-4) start to generate theories about belief - i think
Perner’s theory-theorist
mental states move from concepts as mentalistic (predict others behaviours) to an understanding that they represent beliefs
able to manipulate dual representations so have meta representation insight
Desire-before belief food study
Broccoli or crackers. adults express which one they like. kids then predict desires 14 month olds ant and only do own preference
Appearance-reality distinction study
Shown sponge painted like a rock. asked what looked like and what it is.
rises between 3-4 strong relationship with false-belief task.
Age transitions of theory of mind
Perner- presentation mental model of world but don’t understand its representational
Secondary representation- multiple models by rearranging perceptual info
meta-representation- construct model of relationship between a representation and what it models
Metarepresentation
thoughts about thoughts. an awareness that you can think about something
Representation and pretend play
secondary representation - reorganise some features
meta-representation decoupled similar properties but different functions.
Functional play vs symbolic play
Spatial search
need representation insight to grasp relation of symbol and actual place.
watch toy being hidden in scaled down version performance shift from 2-5 years.
better with more experience, distance and waiting
Embodied nativist view
Leslie- 3 fail due to performance limits
can make automatic inferences (understand mental and false belief)
Limited by non-ToM factors
Embodied conceptual account
Perner and Bloom- Failure due to competence limits. make simple inferences
False belief limited by mental state reasoning (haven’t made conceptual shift yet)
Critical view
Baillargeon’s mentalistic understanding.
infant already have belief
Infants cognition is rich hold knowledge about what others know an can predict behaviour
Evidence from VOE paradigm
mentalistic interpretation - mental states adaptive an hard-wired but can not be expressed.
Embedded Challenge
Learned as cultural knowledge
other studies included small samples of western children with ToM test not being culturally sensitive.
so is it universal and diverse (not one single definition)
Embedded ToM
FB emerges from micro steps
Conturo et al-Scalar measure of ToM - consistent across cultures (develops between 3-4)
