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1.
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
2.
Sobel DM 《Child development》2004,75(3):704-729
This study investigated 3- and 4-year-old's understanding of the relationship between pretense and mental awareness. In Experiments 1 and 2, only a subset of 4-year-olds recognized that sleeping characters and characters ignorant of their appearance were not pretending. However, these experiments had certain linguistic demands, which potentially influenced performance. In Experiments 3, these demand characteristics were reduced; under these circumstances, 3- and 4-year-olds recognized that pretenders were aware of their actions or appearance. However, Experiment 4 showed that even using this modified procedure, 3- and 4-year-olds do not completely understand the relationship between pretense and awareness. These data support the hypotheses that by the age of 4, children have some, but not a complete, understanding of the relationship between pretense and mental awareness. 相似文献
3.
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
4.
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
5.
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
6.
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
7.
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
8.
Jacqueline D. Woolley 《Child development》1995,66(4):1011-1021
In 2 studies, 3- and 4-year-old children's ability to reason about the relation between mental representations and reality was examined. In the first study, children received parallel false belief and "false" imagination tasks. Results revealed that children performed better on imagination tasks than on belief tasks. The second study demonstrated that, when various alternative explanations for better performance on the imagination task were controlled for, children still performed significantly better when reasoning about another person's imagination than when reasoning about another person's belief. These findings suggest that children's understanding that mental representations can differ from reality may emerge first with respect to representations that do not purport to represent reality truthfully. 相似文献
9.
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
10.
Children acquire general knowledge about many kinds of things, but there are few known means by which this knowledge is acquired. In this article, it is proposed that children acquire generic knowledge by sharing in pretend play. In Experiment 1, twenty-two 3- to 4-year-olds watched pretense in which a puppet represented a "nerp" (an unfamiliar kind of animal). For instance, in one scenario, the nerp ate and disliked a carrot. When subsequently asked generic questions about real nerps, children's responses suggested that they had learned general facts (e.g., nerps dislike carrots). In Experiment 2, thirty-two 4- to 5-year-olds learned from scenarios lacking pretend speech or sound effects. The findings reveal a long overlooked means by which children can acquire generic knowledge. 相似文献
11.
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
12.
Pretend Play Skills and the Child's Theory of Mind 总被引：6，自引：0，他引：6
Angeline S. Lillard 《Child development》1993,64(2):348-371
Pretend play has recently been of great interest to researchers studying children's understanding of the mind. One reason for this interest is that pretense seems to require many of the same skills as mental state understanding, and these skills seem to emerge precociously in pretense. Pretend play might be a zone of proximal development, an activity in which children operate at a cognitive level higher than they operate at in nonpretense situations. Alternatively, pretend play might be fool's gold, in that it might appear to be more sophisticated than it really is. This paper first discusses what pretend play is. It then investigates whether pretend play is an area of advanced understanding with reference to 3 skills that are implicated in both pretend play and a theory of mind: the ability to represent one object as two things at once, the ability to see one object as representing another, and the ability to represent mental representations. 相似文献
13.
3 studies examined young children's understanding that if one "remembers" or "forgot," one must have known at a prior time. In Study 1,4-year-olds but not 3-year-olds understood the prior knowledge component of "forgot"; both groups understood that a character with prior knowledge was "gonna remember." Study 2 controlled for the possibility that good performance on "remember" might be due to a simple association of remembering with knowledge. A significant number of 4-year-olds but not 3-year-olds understood that when 2 characters currently knew, the one with prior knowledge remembered, and that when neither character currently knew, the one with prior knowledge forgot. Study 3 made prior knowledge more salient by making the remembered or forgotten item visible to the subjects throughout. 4-year-olds performed near ceiling on both verbs, whereas 3-year-olds' performance did not differ from chance. The results are discussed in relation to children's developing understanding of the mind. 相似文献
14.
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
15.
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
16.
To investigate the symbolic quality of preschoolers' gestural representations in the absence of real objects, 48 children (16 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds) performed 2 tasks. In the first task, they were asked to pretend to use 8 common objects (e.g., "pretend to brush your teeth with a toothbrush"). There was an age-related progression in the symbolic quality of gestural representations. 3- and 4-year-olds used mostly body part gestures (e.g., using an extended finger as the toothbrush), whereas 5-year-olds used imaginary object gestures (e.g., pretending to hold an imaginary toothbrush). To determine if children's symbolic skill is sufficiently flexible to allow them to use gestures other than those spontaneously produced in the first task, in the second task children were asked to imitate, for each object, a gesture modeled by an experimenter. The modeled gesture was different from the one the child performed on the first task (e.g., if the child used a body part gesture to represent a particular object, the experimenter modeled an imaginary object gesture for that object). Ability to imitate modeled gestures was positively related to age but was also influenced by the symbolic mode of gesture. 3-year-olds could not imitate imaginary object gestures as well as body part gestures, suggesting that young preschoolers have difficulty performing symbolic acts that exceed their symbolic level even when the acts are modeled. Results from both tasks provide strong evidence for a developmental progression from concrete body part to more abstract imaginary object gestural representations during the preschool years. 相似文献
17.
The hypothesis that children develop an understanding of causal mechanisms was tested across 3 experiments. In Experiment 1 (N = 48), preschoolers had to choose as efficacious either a cause that had worked in the past, but was now disconnected from its effect, or a cause that had failed to work previously, but was now connected. Four-year-olds chose the now-connected cause more often than 3-year-olds. Experiment 2 (N = 16) showed 4-year-olds responded appropriately to an irrelevant modification in the same causal system. Experiment 3 (N = 24) demonstrated when the mechanism was batteries rather than connection, 3-year-olds could properly distinguish between relevant and irrelevant modifications. Together, these data suggest that understanding of specific causal mechanisms develops at different ages. 相似文献
18.
Friedman WJ 《Child development》2000,71(4):913-932
Four studies with 261 children were conducted to describe 4- through 10-year-olds' ability to differentiate the future distances of events. Distances ranged from later the same day through nearly a year in the future. Judgment methods included pointing to parts of a spatial scale representing future distances and answering open-ended questions. Although 4-year-olds failed to differentiate future distances, 5-year-olds were able to distinguish events that would occur in the coming weeks and months from those that would not occur for many months. However, like young children in earlier studies of memory for time, they confused the near future with the recent past. Children 6 through 8 years of age made more differentiated judgments but collapsed the distances of events more than a few months in the future. By 8 to 10 years of age, children accurately judged distances by using mental representations of the times of events in the annual cycle. 相似文献
19.
The Use of Trait Labels in Making Psychological Inferences 总被引：7，自引：0，他引：7
Three studies investigated children's capacity to use trait labels as tools for making inferences about mental states. For example, knowledge that a story character is "nice" as opposed to "mean" could lead to predictions that the character would respond with greater negative affect upon discovering that his or her action had made someone upset. Study 1 (N = 48) examined whether participants (kindergartners, second graders, fifth graders, and adults) would make different psychological inferences based on whether a character was labeled as "nice" versus "mean." Study 2 (N = 30) examined the same issue with 4-year-olds using a simpler methodology. Study 3 (N = 30) extended the results of Study 2, by examining whether describing characters as "shy" versus "not shy" would lead 4-year-olds to make different mental state inferences. Taken together, these findings suggest that even for young children, trait labels can serve as a basis for making nonobvious inferences. Developmental differences are discussed. 相似文献
20.
The present study investigated whether young children are gullible and readily deceived by another's lies. Specifically, this study examined whether young children believe a lie teller's statement when the statement violates their developing knowledge of a distinction between reality and fantasy. In the first three experiments 3- to 6-year-olds (N = 293) were presented with either a story or a live staged event in which an individual made an implausible statement about a misdeed (claiming that a ghost jumped out of a book and broke a glass). A significant age effect was obtained: 5- and 6-year-olds tended to report that the individual who made the implausible statement had actually committed the misdeed, whereas 3- and 4-year-olds tended to accept the claim of the protagonist. Experiment 4 revealed that 5- and 6-year-olds (N = 43) not only disbelieved an individual's implausible statement but also inferred that the individual was lying and had a deceptive intent. In contrast, Experiment 5 revealed that 3- and 4-year-olds (N = 41) had difficulty disbelieving an individual's implausible claim about an inanimate object (i.e., the claim that a chair came alive and broke the glass). The findings suggest that 5- and 6-year-olds are not so gullible as previously thought, and that they use their well-developed real-world knowledge to detect scapegoating lies. In contrast, many younger children tend to believe another's implausible lies, perhaps due to the fact that the knowledge needed to detect such lies has not yet been consolidated. 相似文献