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1.
A Comparison of Young Children's Understanding of Contradictory Representations in Pretense, Memory, and Belief 总被引：2，自引：0，他引：2
Wendy L. Custer 《Child development》1996,67(2):678-688
The present study examined the nature of young children's understanding of various mental representations. 3- and 4-year-olds were presented with story protagonists who held mental representations (beliefs, pretenses, and memories) that contradicted reality. Subjects chose 1 of 2 alternate " thought pictures " (depicting either the mental representation or reality) that reflected the mental state. While 4-year-olds performed relatively well on all scenario types, 3-year-olds chose the correct thought picture significantly more often for pretense and memory scenarios than for false belief scenarios. These results suggest that young children conceptualize pretense as involving mental representations, and that they have more difficulty understanding contradictory mental representations that purport to correspond to reality. 相似文献
2.
Young Children's Conceptualization of Pretense: Action or Mental Representational State? 总被引：6，自引：1，他引：6
Angeline S. Lillard 《Child development》1993,64(2):372-386
A growing body of research indicates that children do not understand mental representation until around age 4. However, children engage in pretend play by age 2, and pretending seems to require understanding mental representation. This apparent contradiction has been reconciled by the claim that in pretense there is precocious understanding of mental representation. 4 studies tested this claim by presenting children with protagonists who were not mentally representing something (i.e., an animal), either because they did not know about the animal or simply because they were not thinking about being the animal. However, the protagonists were acting in ways that could be consistent with pretending to be that animal. Children were then asked whether the protagonists were pretending to be that animal, and children tended to answer in the affirmative. The results suggest that 4-year-olds do not understand that pretending requires mental representation. Children appear to misconstrue pretense as its common external manifestations, such as actions, until at least the sixth year. 相似文献
3.
David Estes 《Child development》1998,69(5):1345-1360
From Piaget's early work to current theory of mind research, young children have been characterized as having little or no awareness of their mental activity. This conclusion was reexamined by assessing children's conscious access to visual imagery. Four-year-olds, 6-year-olds, and adults were given a mental rotation task in the form of a computer game, but with no instructions to use mental rotation and no other references to mental activity. During the task, participants were asked to explain how they made their judgments. Reaction time patterns and verbal reports revealed that 6-year-olds were comparable to adults both in their spontaneous use and subjective awareness of mental rotation. Four-year-olds who referred to mental activity to explain their performance had reaction time and error patterns consistent with mental rotation; 4-year-olds who did not refer to mental activity responded randomly. A second study with 5-year-olds produced similar results. This research demonstrates that conscious access to at least 1 type of thinking is present earlier than previously recognized. It also helps to clarify the conditions under which young children will and will not notice and report their mental activity. These findings have implications for competing accounts of children's developing understanding of the mind and for the "imagery debate." 相似文献
4.
Joan Peskin 《Child development》1996,67(4):1735-1751
This study examined children's understanding of pretense and deception in folktales in which a villam deceives his victim by pretending to be someone else. In Experiment 1, the 3-year-olds distinguished the real from the pretend persona, but neither understood the victim's false belief nor predicted that the villain would perpetrate the unwelcome act. In Experiment 2, revealing the villainous action facilitated 3-year-olds' predictions of this action during a retelling of the stories, but did not improve subjects' understanding of the victim's false belief. In Experiment 3, although the tasks were further refined to reduce the possibility of misinterpretation, 3-year-olds again did not follow the deception. The results are discussed in relation to 3-year-olds' difficulties with deceptive appearances and their understanding of acting-as-if in pretense. 相似文献
5.
In 3 studies we investigated 3- through 6-year-olds' knowledge of thinking and feeling by examining their understanding of how emotions can change when memories of past sad events are cued by objects in the current environment. In Study 1, 48 4-, 5-, and 6-year-olds were presented with 4 illustrated stories in which tocal characters experience minor sad events. Later, each story character encounters a visual cue that is related to one of his or her previous sad experiences. Children were told that the character felt sad and they were asked ot explain why. Study 1 suggested considerable competence as well as substantial development in the years between 4 and 6 in the understandings of the influence of mental activity on emotions. Studies 2 and 3 more systematically explored preschoolers' understanding of cognitive cuing and emotional change with difterent types of situations and cues. Across these 2 studies, 108 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds listened to illustrated stories that featured story characters who each experienced a sad event and swho were later exposed to a related cue. Children were not only asked to explain why the characters suddenly felt sad, but in some stories, they were also asked to predict and explain how another character, who was never at the past sad event, would feel. Results of studies 2 and 3 showed an initial understanding of cognitive cuing and emotion in some children as young as 3, replicated and extended the evidence for significant developmental changes in that understanding during the preschool years, and revealed that the strenght and consistency of preschoolers' knowledge of cognitive cuing and emotion was affected by whether cues were the sme, or only similar to, parts of the earlier events. 相似文献
6.
The relation between early fantasy/pretense and children's knowledge about mental life was examined in a study of 152 3- and 4-year-old boys and girls. Children were interviewed about their fantasy lives (e.g., imaginary companions, impersonation of imagined characters) and were given tasks assessing their level of pretend play and verbal intelligence. In a second session 1 week later, children were given a series of theory of mind tasks, including measures of appearance-reality, false belief, representational change, and perspective taking. The theory of mind tasks were significantly intercorrelated with the effects of verbal intelligence and age statistically controlled. Individual differences in fantasy/pretense were assessed by (1) identifying children who created imaginary characters, and (2) extracting factor scores from a combination of interview and behavioral measures. Each of these fantasy assessments was significantly related to the theory of mind performance of the 4-year-old children, independent of verbal intelligence. 相似文献
7.
In 2 studies, we address young children's understanding of the origin and representational relations of imagination, a fictional mental state, and contrast this with their understanding of knowledge, an epistemic mental state. In the first study, 54 3- and 4-year-old children received 2 tasks to assess their understanding of origins, and 4 stories to assess their understanding of representational relations. Children of both ages understood that, whereas perception is necessary for knowledge, it is irrelevant for imagination. Results for children's understanding of representational relations revealed intriguing developmental differences. Although children understood that knowledge represents reality more truthfully than imagination, 3-year-olds often claimed that imagination reflected reality. The second study provided additional evidence that younger 3-year-olds judge that imaginary representations truthfully reflect reality. We propose that children's responses indicate an early understanding of the distinction between mental states and the world, but also a confusion regarding the extent to which mental contents represent the physical world. 相似文献
8.
This study examined 2- to 3-year-olds' ability to make a pretend-real distinction in the absence of content cues. Children watched two actors side by side. One was really eating, and the other was pretending to eat, but in neither case was information about content available. Following the displays, children were asked to retrieve the real food (Experiment 1) or point to the container with the real food (Experiments 2 and 3). 3- and 2.5-year-olds distinguished between the real and pretend acts based on behavioral cues alone. Two-year-olds chose the containers at random, but their spontaneous reactions suggested that they discriminated the real acts from pretense to some degree. Possible accounts for the discrepancy between the different behavioral measures are discussed. 相似文献
9.
Body or Mind: Children's Categorizing of Pretense 总被引：5，自引：0，他引：5
Angeline S. Lillard 《Child development》1996,67(4):1717-1734
Researchers studying early social cognition have been particularly interested in pretend play and have obtained evidence indicating that young children do not understand that pretending involves mental representation. The present research investigates whether children think of pretending as a mental state at all, by looking at whether they cluster it with other mental states or with physical processes when making certain judgments. The results from 5 experiments suggest that most children under 6 years of age see pretending as primarily physical. Further, when asked about pretending as a 2-part process entailing planning and execution, even 8-year-olds claim that execution of pretense does not involve the mind, although the planning aspect of pretense does. 相似文献
10.
Preschoolers' Attributions of Mental States in Pretense 总被引：3，自引：0，他引：3
When young children appear to recognize that someone else is engaging in make-believe play, do they infer what the pretender is thinking? Are they aware that the pretender is thinking about a pretend scenario yet knows what the real situation is? Preschoolers ages 3–5 ( N = 45) viewed scenes from the Barney & Friends television series depicting either make-believe or realistic actions. Children were questioned concerning the presence of pretense and the thoughts and beliefs of the TV characters. The children where also presented with false belief and appearance/reality theory of mind tasks. Children who identified when TV characters were engaging in pretend play did not necessarily infer the pretenders thoughts and beliefs. Inferring pretenders' thoughts was related to performance on false belief and appearance/reality tasks, but simply recognizing pretense was not. These data support the view that children initially learn to recognize pretense from contextual cues and are able to infer pretenders' beliefs only with further development of metarepresentational ability. 相似文献
11.
Saying something "almost happened" indicates that one is considering a close counterfactual world. Previous evidence suggested that children start to consider these close counterfactuals at around 2 years of age (P. L. Harris, 1997), substantially earlier than they pass other tests of counterfactual thinking. However, this success appears to result from false positives. In Experiment 1 (N = 41), 3- and 4-year-olds could identify a character who almost completed an action when the comparison did not complete it. However, in Experiments 1 and 2 (N = 98), children performed poorly when the comparison character completed the action. In Experiment 3 (N = 28), 5- and 6-year-olds consistently passed the task, indicating that they made appropriate counterfactual interpretations of the "almost" statements. This understanding of close counterfactuals proved more difficult than standard counterfactuals. 相似文献
12.
2 experiments examined children's understanding of the expression of speaker certainty and uncertainty and its relation to their developing theory of mind. In the first experiment, 80 children between 3 and 6 years of age were presented with a task in which they had to guess the location of an object hidden in 1 of 2 boxes. As clues to location, the children were presented with contrasting pairs of statements by 2 puppets. Different trials contained all of the possible pairwise combinations of either the modal verbs must, might, and could or the modal adjuncts probably, possibly, and maybe. Results showed that while 3-year-olds did not differentiate between any of the modal contrasts presented, 4-year-olds and older children were able to find the hidden object on the basis of what they heard. Performance was best for contrasts involving a highly certain term (either must or probably) paired with a less certain term (might, could, possibly, and maybe). Experiment 2 was designed to determine whether competence with modal terms was related to competence with mental terms in the same task, and whether performance on the certainty task was related to other aspects of the child's understanding of the nature of beliefs. 26 4-year-olds were presented with the certainty task, involving both modal and mental terms, and with tasks assessing their understanding of false beliefs, representational change, and the appearance-reality distinction. Results showed that all of these tasks were intercorrelated, implying that what may develop at 4 years of age may be a general understanding of the representational nature of belief. 相似文献
13.
Young Children's Understanding of the Mind-Body Distinction 总被引：3，自引：0，他引：3
4 experiments investigated children's understanding of the mind-body distinction. Children of ages 4 and 5 recognized not only the differential modifiability of changeable versus unchangeable human properties and bodily versus mental properties, but also the independence of activities of bodily organs from a person's intention (Experiment 1). When presented 3 types of causal explanations (i.e., intentional, vitalistic, mechanical), 6-year-olds chose most often as most plausible for bodily functions vitalistic explanations (i.e., those ascribing the phenomena to a relevant bodily organ's initiative and effortful engagement in activity); 8-year-olds chose the vitalistic explanations second most often, following mechanical ones (Experiment 2). However, 6-year-olds, as well as 8-year-olds and adults, did not always choose vitalistic explanations over intentional explanations (Experiment 3); whereas they tended to prefer vitalistic explanations for biological phenomena, they predominantly accepted intentional ones for psychological phenomena (Experiment 3A). These results suggest that children as young as 6 years of age have acquired a form of biology as an autonomous domain which is separate from that of psychology. 相似文献
14.
There's More to the Picture Than Meets the Eye: Young Children's Difficulty Understanding Biased Interpretation 总被引：2，自引：0，他引：2
5 experiments investigated children's understanding that expectations based on prior experience may influence a person's interpretation of ambiguous visual information. In Experiment 1, 4- and 5-year-olds were asked to infer a puppet's interpretation of a small, ambiguous portion of a line drawing after the puppet had been led to have an erroneous expectation about the drawing's identity. Children of both ages failed to ascribe to the puppet an interpretation consistent with the puppet's expectation. Instead, children attributed complete knowledge of the drawing to the puppet. In Experiment 2, the task was modified to reduce memory demands, but 4- and 5-year-olds continued to overlook the puppet's prior expectations when asked to infer the puppet's interpretation of an ambiguous scene. 6-year-olds responded correctly. In Experiment 3, 4- and 5-year-olds correctly reported that an observer who saw a restricted view would not know what was in the drawing, but children did not realize that the observer's interpretation might be mistaken. Experiments 4 and 5 explored the possibility that children's errors reflect difficulty inhibiting their own knowledge when responding. The results are taken as evidence that understanding of interpretation begins at approximately age 6 years. 相似文献
15.
2 studies investigated young children's understanding that as the retention interval increases, so do the chances that one will forget. In Study 1 (24 3-year-olds and 24 4-year-olds), 4-year-olds but not 3-year-olds understood that of 2 characters who simultaneously saw an object, the character who waited longer before attempting to find it would not remember where it was. In study 2 (24 3-year-olds and 24 4-year-olds), 4-year-olds but not 3-year-olds understood that of 2 objects seen by a character, the object that was seen a "long long time ago" would be forgotten and the object seen "a little while ago" would be remembered. The findings are discussed in relation to research on young children's understanding of the acquisition, retention, and retrieval of knowledge over time. 相似文献
16.
Research suggests that young children may see a direct and one-way connection between facts about the world and epistemic mental states (e.g., belief). Conventions represent instances of active constructions of the mind that change facts about the world. As such, a mature understanding of convention would seem to present a strong challenge to children's simplified notions of epistemic relations. Three experiments assessed young children's abilities to track behavioral, representational, and truth aspects of conventions. In Experiment 1, 3- and 4-year-old children (N = 30) recognized that conventional stipulations would change people's behaviors. However, participants generally failed to understand how stipulations might affect representations. In Experiment 2, 3-, 5-, and 7-year-old children (N = 53) were asked to reason about the truth values of statements about pretenses and conventions. The two younger groups of children often confused the two types of states, whereas older children consistently judged that conventions, but not pretenses, changed reality. In Experiment 3, the same 3- and 5-year-olds (N = 42) participated in tasks assessing their understanding of representational diversity (e.g., false belief). In general, children's performance on false-belief and "false-convention" tasks did not differ, which suggests that conventions were understood as involving truth claims (as akin to beliefs about physical reality). Children's difficulties with the idea of conventional truth seems consistent with current accounts of developing theories of mind. 相似文献
17.
50 33-month-old children were observed at home with their siblings and mothers. Observational measures of pretend play, observer ratings of the child's, mother's, and sibling's behavior, and measures of family discourse about feelings were collected. At 40 months each child was assessed on Bartsch and Wellman's false beliefs task and Denham's affective perspective taking task. Results revealed individual differences in the amount and sophistication of young children's social pretend play and suggested that these individual differences are related to experiences in the relationships that young children have with their mothers and siblings. Results also indicated that early social pretend play was significantly related to the child's developing understanding of other people's feelings and beliefs. The data are interpreted as providing support for the notion that early experience in social pretense is associated with children's mastery of the relation between mental life and real life. The importance of considering the relationship context of social pretense is also discussed. 相似文献
18.
In a series of 4 studies, we explored preschoolers' understanding of thought bubbles. Very few 3-year-olds or 4-year-olds we tested knew what a thought-bubble depiction was without instruction. But, if simply told that the thought bubble "shows what someone is thinking," the vast majority of 3-year-olds and 4-year-olds easily understood the devices as depicting thoughts generally and individual thought contents specifically. In total, these children used thought-bubble depictions to ascertain the contents of characters' thoughts in a variety of situations; appropriately distinguished such depictions from mere associated actions or objects; described thought bubbles in the language of mental states; judged that persons' thoughts in these depictions were subjective in the sense of person-specific (and hence 2 people can have different thoughts about the same state of affairs); and judged that thought-bubble thoughts ( a ) were representational in the sense of depicting or showing some other state of affairs, ( b ) were mental and thus showed intangible, private, internal thoughts unlike real pictures or photographs, and ( c ) can be false, that is, can depict a person's misrepresentation of some state of affairs. We discuss the implications of these findings for young children's understanding of thoughts and thought bubbles, for their learning and comprehension of pictorial conventions, and for the use of thought bubbles to assess children's early understanding of mind. 相似文献
19.
Real physical objects (e.g., a chair) can be distinguished from mental entities (e.g., a thought about a chair) on the basis of a number of criteria. 3 of these are behavioral-sensory evidence--whether the entity can be seen, touched, and physically acted upon; public existence--whether other persons experience the entity; and consistent existence--whether the entity consistently exists over time. Two studies tested 3-5-year-old children's ability to distinguish real versus mental entities on the basis of these criteria and to categorize such entities suitably. Even 3-year-olds were able to judge real and mental entities appropriately on the basis of the 3 criteria, to sort such entities as explicitly real and not-real, and to provide cogent explanations of their choices as well. A further distinction between real and mental entities is that mental entities can be about physically impossible, nonexistent things (e.g., a dog that flies). A third study demonstrated that 3-5-year-olds also appreciated this distinction. Taken together, these results contradict a common characterization of the young child as unaware of the fundamental ontological distinction between the internal mental world and objective reality. The implications of these findings are discussed for 3 other bodies of research: Piaget's characterization of young children as realists, Keil's theory of ontological development, and recent research on children's understanding of the mind. 相似文献
20.
Young Children's Understanding of Changes in Their Mental States 总被引：4，自引：1，他引：4
3-year-old children have difficulty reporting their past false beliefs. We investigated their ability to remember and report other types of past mental state, in particular, pretenses, images, perceptions, desires, and intentions. In a series of tasks, children were placed in one mental state, that state was changed, and they were asked to report the initial state. 4-year-olds were generally able to report all their past mental states, including beliefs. 3-year-olds were able to report past pretenses, images, and perceptions extremely well. They had great difficulty reporting past beliefs. Reporting past desires and intentions was more difficult than reporting pretenses, images, and perceptions, but slightly less difficult than reporting beliefs. The evidence suggests that 3-year-olds have difficulty understanding the nature of representation. 相似文献