ToM Flashcards
Theory of mind (ToM)
The insight that people hold mental states and that these govern behaviour
Mental states (inferred) – e.g. belief, desire, goals
Allow us to make sense of the social world
– to predict and explain people’s actions
due to their false belief to explain their irrational acting
Desire-based ToM
How are people’s desires changing?
People’s desires are idiosyncratic (personal to themselves) and constantly changing (at different age stages of their life)
Desire-based ToM
Do children understand that other people may have desires that differ from theirs?
Research found:
18 month olds understood experimenter’s desired food differed from theirs
but not 14 month olds
What does this suggest?
Suggests they understand that desire is:
a subjective mental state
that can differ from person to person at 18 months
What is the defninition of:
Distinction between mind and reality/ world
Person has a representation of the world, the contents of which may be quite different from the contents of the world itself or from our own beliefs
Belief-based ToM
Shift from a situation-based
to
representation-based understanding of behaviour
What shift is necessary in Belief-based ToM?
Shift from a situation-based
to
representation-based understanding of behaviour
Eg. behaviour based on a representation of reality =
I bring an umbrella because I thought it was going to rain, I was wrong it didn’t rain
How can we tell whether someone has a ToM?
False belief task - Standard for testing ToM
When testing ToM which task tests whether child can represent what another person believes in contrast to their own beliefs or reality?
False belief task
False belief task:
What are the 3 main pradigms?
Unexpected transfer task:
Max chocolate task, the Sally-Ann task
Deceptive box task:
Smarties task (psy books)
Which task:
Explains while Maxi is out playing, his Mum takes the chocolate from the cupboard and grates some of it into a cake. Maxi is returning from play, feeling hungry. He wants his chocolate.
Test Q: Where will Maxi look for his chocolate?
Memory Q: Where did Maxi put his chocolate?
Reality Q: Where did Mum put his chocolate
Children without false belief x : fridge/ random answer
Children with false belief ! : cupboard (right answer)
Unexpected transfer task
What were the results of the Unexpected transfer task:
Max chocolate task
> 5 yrs
Children 5 and over identified correct place (cupboard)
< 5 yrs
Younger children identified wrong place (fridge)
Reality question: Where did Mum put his chocolate?
showing an ego-centric bias response
Which task:
Involves the Sally-Ann task?
Unexpected transfer task
Why is a False belief task more useful than a True belief task?
True belief tasks test whether child can represent what another person believes when that belief matches their own beliefs or reality
whereas False belief tasks test true reasoning in a false context, representing their mental state from a false version of reality
Which task:
Involves children being asked
what is inside this tube? (guess)
What is in it? (see)
What will your friend say is inside? (predict)
In addition to a reflection
When you first saw this tube, before we opened it, what did you think was inside the smarties tube?
Findings?
Deceptive box task:
Smarties task
3-4yr olds had difficulty acknowledging false belief
- in others
- and own PRIOR false belief once know what is inside
On average with False Belief tasks:
3yr olds…
4yr olds…
3-year-old children usually fail FB tasks
4-year-old children usually pass FB tasks
Traditionally taken as evidence that around this time children ‘acquire’ a theory of mind. What does this mean?
Radical conceptual shift and stage-like development around 4 years
ToM revealed in natural conversation
What does this mean?
They think about mental states before they reach ToM
Mental state terms
Children may use mental state terminal thought to reflect previously false held belief
-May be something about the TASK that is underestimating childrens confidence
ToM in 3 year olds:
A lack of positive evidence doesn’t necessarily mean lack of competence, as there may be performance limitations masking children’s competence:
Name some of the problems that may occur during ToM false belief tasks for 3yr olds
Problem with language - focused on word where where is the chocolate
Made Test question more specific – “where will maxi look first of all?”
Story comprehension - checking follow on of the story
Simplifying the task improves performance but not dramatically!
Wellman, Cross & Watson, 2001:
meta-analysis of 178 studies ToM in 3 year olds
Findings?
Support for substantial developmental effect/ trend over preschool years:
< 3.5yrs below chance > 4yrs above chance
Can see which modulations helped/ didn’t help
Which task variables make a difference in the ToM
Unexpected transfer task?
Improve performance:
Deceptive motive,
Active participation
Salience of mental state
Irrelevant:
Type of task/question,
Nature of protagonist/object
Wellman et al (2001) concluded that:
Although manipulating several variables improved performance,
ie-
Deceptive motive,
Active participation
Salience of mental state
, this was the case across all ages rather than just younger children
– so not selectively unmasking early competence
None of the variable manipulations improved performance of 3yrs above chance
Universality: Cross-cultural comparisons:
Despite leading very different lives children in industrialized and rural societies
both show a
similar developmental shift between 3 and 5 years
What are the 2 factors contributing to ToM development?
1- Role of social experience
2- Biological maturation
Which factor describes the aiding understanding of mental states which arises from interactions with other people when contributing to ToM development?
Role of social experience
Which factor describes children to expressing their understanding of mental states which arises from improvement in executive functioning when contributing to ToM development?
Biological maturation
Role of experience contributing to ToM:
Harris (1999)
Conversations in general are crucial for exposing children to other people’s perspectives
Providing children with the vocabulary needed to discuss and reflect on mental states
Evidence for the role of experience?
Children with older siblings show earlier ToM
Children whose parents talk about mental states more understand false belief earlier than other children
Deaf children of hearing parents show a developmental lag on FB (due to only school exposes them to mental states in dign language)
In contrast, deaf children of signing parents are comparable with hearing children (as they are exposed to mental state talk via sign language)
Theory of Mind as a Scale:
Wellman & Liu (2004)
What are the 4 sections?
Diverse Desires
Diverse Beliefs
Knowledge-access
False Belief
Hidden Emotion
Theory of Mind as a Scale:
Wellman & Liu (2004)
Which section refers to someone can feel one way but display a different emotion?
Hidden emotion
their mind and their outward of behaviour
Theory of Mind as a Scale:
Wellman & Liu (2004)
Which section refers to something that can be true, but someone might falsely believe something different?
False belief
Theory of Mind as a Scale:
Wellman & Liu (2004)
Which section refers to something can be true, but someone might not know that?
Knowledge-access
Someone is being ignorant about something, even though you know its true
Theory of Mind as a Scale:
Wellman & Liu (2004)
Which section refers to people can have different beliefs about the same situation?
Diverse Beliefs
I have a belief that the noise is the cat
Neighbour thinks the sound is the squirrel
not necessarily right or wrong
Theory of Mind as a Scale:
Wellman & Liu (2004)
Which section refers to people having different desires for the same thing?
Diverse desires
might not like the same thing
Cross culteral differences in Tom Scales:
Children in Western countries show
DD>DB>KA>FB>HE
- may be due to values focused on Independent beliefs (Individualistic society) hidden emotions come last
Cross cultural differences in Tom Scales:
Chinese and Iranian children show:
DD>KA>DB>FB>HE
They understood people can hold diverse beliefs later compared to understanding Knowledge-access
(Someone is being ignorant about something, even though you know its true)
-may be due to less exposure to diverse beliefs, as they hold group value in collectivist cultures
The critical role of Executive Functioning may result in childrens ability to pass ToM tasks.
What are Executive functions?
A set of domain-general cognitive abilities
- help us to control and guide our attention/ behaviour
These have to develop in order to pass the ToM tasks
What are the 3 main Executive functions?
1- Inhibition
2- Cognitive ability
3- Working memory
Which Executive function ignores distracting information or suppressing unwanted responses?
eg. strook task/ bear/dragon task/ ignoring text msgs
Inhibition
-do not do what dragon says
Which Executive function responds to the same thing in different ways depending on the context?
eg. Wisconsin Card Sorting Test/ Task-switching paradigm
Multiple passwords/ Up vs down in lift
Cognitive flexibility
Which Executive function holds important information or your ‘goal’ in mind, Manipulating information in your head?
eg. Digit span/ Spatial span/ mental shopping list
Working memory
Name 3 roles of Executive Functioning in false belief tasks:
Ignore distracting/salient information
– ignore own current belief;
disengage from a salient real-world situation to attend to an intangible abstract representation
response inhibition
- inhibit a prepotent or habitual way of responding
(i.e., pointing to the ‘‘true’’ location of the object)
working memory
-indicate the correct answer
while holding in mind two different and conflicting representations
Executive functions – Biological constraints
Which lobes of the brain are very important for executive functions?
The Frontal Lobes
take a long time to develop
Important developments in Inhibitory control (IC)
take place in 1st 6 years of life,
improvement age 3-6
Evidence of strong positive correlation between children’s inhibitory control (e.g. on Bear/Dragon task) and FB performance:
If you test the same set of children on both tasks,
If children do well on 1 they will most likely do well on the other
What does this suggest?
Suggests that: development in IC and ToM may be related
Inhibition Control
- may be a crucial enabling factor for ToM development, affecting both the emerge and express mental state knowledge.
Implicit understanding of False belief tasks:
Investigated children’s facial expressions as indices of their belief understanding
What signs will they show if 3 yr olds perceive the conflict between a person’s belief and reality?
Predicted they will show signs of suspense
eg. lip biting and brow furrowing)
when observing an actor about to act on basis of their false belief
Found greater instances of expressed tension in the false belief cf. true belief condition
suggests 3 yr olds expressed knowledge of another’s false belief and recognised the affective consequences of the false belief
Which type of knowledge is
knowledge easily accessible to the child
Measure via elicited response, e.g. verbal answer to a question
Explicit knowledge
Implicit understanding of False belief tasks:
Investigated children’s facial expressions as indices of their belief understanding
In contrast, children’s performance on a classic FB task was poor and unrelated to the amount of expressions they displayed while watching the FB videos
What does this suggest?
Suggests expressions are independent from
and emerge prior to explicit knowledge of false beliefs.
Which type of knowledge is
Knowledge the child is unaware of
Measure via spontaneous response:
Emotional response
Anticipatory looking
Violation of expectancy
Implicit knowledge
Implicit understanding of FB (Clements & Perner, 1994)
Aim: to get evidence for a period of implicit understanding of FB that precedes the onset of explicit understanding
Method: Tested 44 children aged 2y5m – 4y6m on ‘unexpected transfer task’
What were the 2 implicit and explicit measures?
Implicit measure – anticipatory looking
Explicit measure – standard verbal response
Which paradigm for implicit measuring in children measures the direction of an infant/child’s first look after an event?
Participants’ looking behaviour is analysed to determine if they correctly expect/anticipate what will happen next
Requires prediction (cf. with VOE, which relies on reactive looking)
Implicit measure
Anticipatory looking paradigm
Anticipation prompt:
“Sam is waking up. He’s going to get his cheese. I wonder where he’s going to look”
<2 sec pause – record child’s eye gaze> = Indirect Measure
Test Question: “Which box will he open first?” = Direct Measure
Findings: passing pattern of response
86% children over 2y11m showed looking pattern indicative of FB understanding
Only 1 child under 2y11m looked at correct place
Dissociation of implicit – explicit understanding of belief
3yr olds looked to correct location even though gave incorrect answer!
Large gap between implicit and explicit understanding from 2y11m
What does this data suggest?
Data suggests that children develop an implicit or unconscious understanding of false belief at an earlier age than they develop an explicit or conscious understanding
Are there earlier false belief understanding in infancy?
Onishi & Baillargeon
Used a totally nonverbal task to test for implicit FB understanding in 15-month-old (pre-verbal) infants
Used Violation of expectancy method
What is this method?
Familiarise infant to an event
Present test behaviour that is either:
1- Consistent
or 2- Inconsistent
With the prior event
If infant looks longer at inconsistent event taken as evidence that they are surprised
Indicates some level of knowledge about what should happen
Looking time studies with infants:
Violation-of-expectancy method
Onishi & Baillargeon (2005)
– looking time study with 15m olds (watch vid)
Significantly longer looking when expectation violated,
so, actor’s action inconsistent with actor’s belief:
When actor reaches in wrong box when has true belief
Or when reaches in right box, when actually has false belief
Longer looking time at the yellow box condition (which challanges false belief)
suggests infants expect people to search for objects consistent with their beliefs about the object location, not where the objects are in reality.
- Evidence for 15m of reasoning
theoretical importance that language and EF do not have a role to play as these infants are pre-verbal
Which Model has been proposed to account for this contradiction of children typically pass FB test age 4 but
Younger children who are non-verbal FB still have an understanding of FB through implicit non-verbal behaviour?
The Dual Process Model
But these tasks may draw on different levels of knowledge (implicit vs. explicit)
Dual-route (process) model
Two systems can compute beliefs of others:
Fast and efficient system
Slow and cognitively demanding system
Implicit is only necessary for non-pre verbal infants
explicit is then necessary at 4 years when child needs to communicate
