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1.
Three-, 5-, and 7-year-olds and adults ( N = 64) listened to stories depicting 2 protagonists of different ages (infant and child or child and grownup) that encounter an entity that looks like a real (e.g., a snake) or an imaginary (e.g., a ghost) fear-inducing creature. Participants predicted and explained each protagonist's intensity of fear. Results showed significant age-related increases in knowledge that infants and adults would experience less intense fears than young children and that people's fears are causally linked to their cognitive mental states. Across age, stories involving imaginary beings elicited more frequent mental explanations for fear than stories about real creatures. Results are discussed in relation to children's developing awareness of the mind as mediating between situations and emotions. 相似文献
2.
Dimensional adjectives are inherently relative in meaning, and so provide a test of children's ability to apply nonegocentric standards. The present research investigates children's ability to apply one kind of relative standard assessing the size of an object with regard to its intended use (a functional interpretation). In 3 experiments, children 3-5 years of age were asked to judge objects as "big" or "little" according to their function (e.g., a hat for a doll; a key for a door). Contrary to previous claims, the ability to use nonegocentric functional standards was present by age 3. However, 3-year-olds performed above chance only when their attention was directed to the relevant function, either by means of action (when actually shown how the objects fit together) or by means of language. In contrast, 4-year-olds performed well without additional action-based or linguistic cues. It is suggested that children have an implicit ordering in their interpretations of big and little, such that functional judgments are lower in priority than 2 other standards: normative (the size of an object is compared to a stored mental standard, e.g., a chihuahua is small for a dog) and perceptual (the size of an object is compared to another physically present object of the same type, e.g., a chihuahua 6 inches tall is big compared to a chihuahua 4 inches tall). Even 3-year-olds can make nonegocentric functional judgments of relative size, but the basis of the judgment must be unambiguous. 相似文献
3.
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
4.
On Wooden Pillows: Multiple Classification and Children''s Category-based Inductions 总被引：6，自引：0，他引：6
Previous research has indicated that preschoolers do not distinguish between properties that are generalizable within a given category and those that are not. 2 possible general constraints on children's cognition are proposed to account for these findings. 3 studies are reported that argue against the presence of such general constraints. We examine preschoolers' understanding of the properties associated with material (e.g., wood, cotton) and object (e.g., chair, pillow) categories. In Study 1, subjects consistently made inductions based on the material compositions of items when asked to predict texture and fragility. In Study 2, the same subjects judged that items that shared material would share an unfamiliar dispositional property (e.g., gets sodden in water), but items that shared object kind would share a novel functional property (e.g., used for accelerating). Study 3 tested a younger sample of 3-year-olds and found the same sensitivity to category type, albeit with larger individual differences. By age 3, children use different modes of categorization to generalize different kinds of phenomena. These results argue against general limitations on children's abilities to use categories to make inductions. Even when children lack specific theoretical knowledge, the ability to organize phenomena into domains allows children to recognize which categories are relevant in different situations. This understanding can provide a basis for the development of more specific theories. 相似文献
5.
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
6.
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
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8.
This investigation examined how the nature of the spatial relation influences young children's ability to remember and communicate about nested landmarks. Of particular interest was whether young children are more likely to use a supporting than a proximal landmark to disambiguate identical landmarks (e.g., "it's in the basket on the table" vs. "it's in the basket next to the table"). 3- and 4-year-olds hid objects in a dollhouse and described their locations. Children had to disambiguate the target primary landmark by relating it to a supporting or proximal secondary landmark. Both age groups almost always provided the primary landmark, but 4-year-olds were more likely to provide the secondary landmark than were 3-year-olds. Moreover, children were more successful at providing supporting than proximal secondary landmarks. These results suggest that both referential communication skills and biases in coding location influence children's communication about nested landmarks. 相似文献
9.
Generic noun phrases (e.g., "Bats live in caves") are important for expressing knowledge about abstract kinds. Past work has found that parents frequently use generic noun phrases in their speech to young children. However, little is known regarding how children understand these expressions, nor which cues signal generic meaning. The present set of 5 studies examined the influence of linguistic form class (e.g., "What color are dogs?" [generic] versus "What color are the dogs?" [nongeneric]) and of pragmatic context (e.g., "What color are they?" in the presence of either a single exemplar [generic] or multiple exemplars [nongeneric]). Participants were 2-year-olds (N = 42), 3-year-olds (N = 40), 4-year-olds (N = 40), and adults (N = 51). The data indicate that by 2 years of age, children use linguistic form class, and by 3 years of age, children use pragmatic context. These findings demonstrate that young children have begun to understand the distinction between generic and nongeneric noun phrases from a very young age, and that identification of generics is signaled not by formal or pragmatic cues alone, but by a combination of information from both language form and pragmatic context. It is suggested that children make use of multiple linguistic and conceptual cues to acquire and interpret generics. 相似文献
10.
2 experiments examined children's understanding of the distinction between real and apparent emotion. In Experiment 1, 6- and 10-year-old children listened to stories in which it would be appropriate for the story protagonist to feel either a positive or negative emotion but to hide that emotion. Subjects were asked to say both how the protagonist would look and how the protagonist would really feel, and to justify their claims. The results indicated that 6- and 10-year-olds alike could distinguish quite accurately between real and apparent emotion, although 10-year-olds were somewhat better at justifying this distinction. In Experiment 2, a slightly modified procedure was used to test 4- and 6-year-olds. Again, 6-year-olds demonstrated their grasp of the difference between real and apparent emotion, and even 4-year-olds showed a limited grasp of the distinction. The findings are discussed in relation to recent research concerning children's concept of mind, their grasp of the appearance-reality distinction, their ability to produce complex, embedded justifications, and their ideas about emotion. 相似文献
11.
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
12.
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
13.
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
14.
Understanding Natural Cause: Children''s Explanations of How Objects and Their Properties Originate 总被引：1，自引：0，他引：1
An understanding of natural cause includes the realization that events can occur independently of human activity or intentions. It also often entails realizing that causal mechanisms can be nonobservable or nonobvious. The present research investigated to what extent children ages 4-7 have developed a concept of natural cause. Study 1 examined children's understandings of object origins (e.g., how the sun began); Study 2 probed children's causal understandings of object behaviors and properties (e.g., why rabbits hop and have long ears). In both studies, children by age 4 were sensitive to the natural kind-artifact distinction in their explanations. They mentioned human intervention for human-made artifacts but rarely for naturally occurring things. Moreover, subjects at all ages were able to identify specific kinds of natural cause, including intrinsic causes (such as growth) and inborn nature. Finally, subjects understood the link between nonobvious, internal parts and self-generated activity (e.g., that bones are important for the flight of a bird). Altogether, these results suggest that even preschool children realize that natural causes exist. They contradict Piaget's characterization of young children as artificialistic (believing that naturally occurring things are created by people) and as focused on observable properties. 相似文献
15.
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
16.
1 hypothesis about children's developing conception of the mind is that preschoolers are limited to an understanding that persons have internal, mental contents like thoughts and beliefs, whereas older children and adults conceive of the mind itself as an independent, active structure or processor. Adults' conception of the mind in this independent active fashion seems evident in their use of personified mental metaphor (e.g., "My mind tricked me"). 3 studies examined the development and consolidation of this active, personified view. Study 1 provided an analysis of natural language data regarding 1 child's uses of vision words such as see and look from age 2 1/2 to 8 years. We examined the child's use of such words to refer literally to perception (e.g., "I see the TV") and also to refer nonliterally to active mental processes such as comprehension and inference (e.g., "I see what you mean"). Studies 2 and 3 examined 6-, 8-, and 10-year-olds' comprehension and production of mental metaphors. In a metaphor comprehension task, we asked children to interpret personified metaphoric statements about the mind (e.g., "My mind wandered") and 3 comparison domains, mechanics (e.g., "The car is dead"), nature (e.g., "The wind is howling"), and emotion (e.g., "Her heart was smiling"). In an explanation task, we asked children to explain the processes underlying the making of both instant photos and mental images. The findings reveal a developing ability to interpret and produce statements personifying the mind and provide considerable evidence about children's movement toward a conception of the mind as an independent entity deserving reference and conceptualization in its own right. 相似文献
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18.
Developing Theories of Mind: Understanding Concepts and Relations between Mental Activities 总被引：1，自引：0，他引：1
Paula J. Schwanenflugel William V. Fabricius Joyce Alexander 《Child development》1994,65(6):1546-1563
The purpose of the study was to expand our knowledge of older children's understanding of the unique features and potential relations existing among mental activities. 8- and 10-year-olds as well as adults were asked to rate the similarity of pairs of mental activity scenarios in terms of how their mind would be used for each one. The scenarios involved primarily Prospective Memory, List Memory, Recognition Memory, Comprehension, Inference, Planning, Comparison, or Selective Attention. There was a developing tendency to organize mental activities on the degree to which memory was a component of the activity. Several distinctions were also more likely to be made with age: the distinction between recall and recognition, the distinction between the roles of internal and external cues in mediating cognitive activity, and the distinction among the various roles of attentional processes in regulating input from the sensory world. Together, these findings suggest that a constructivist theory of mind develops in later childhood. 相似文献
19.
Six match-to-sample picture/object selection experiments were designed to explore children's knowledge about superordinate words (e.g., "food") and how they acquire this knowledge. Three factors were found to influence the learning and extension of superordinate words in 3- to 5-year-old children (N = 230): The number of standards (one versus two), the type of standards presented (from different basic-level categories versus from the same basic-level category), and the nature of the object representations used (pictures versus objects). A different pattern of superordinate word acquisition was found between 3-year-olds and 4- and 5-year-olds. Although 4- and 5-year-olds could learn and extend novel words to superordinate categories in the presence of two picture exemplars from different categories or a single three-dimensional (3-D) exemplar, 3-year-olds could do so only in the presence of two 3-D exemplars. These findings indicate that young children's acquisition of superordinate words is influenced by multiple factors and that there is a developmental progression from multiple exemplars to single exemplars in superordinate word learning. 相似文献
20.
A tale of two representations: the misinformation effect and children's developing theory of mind 总被引：1，自引：0，他引：1
The present research investigates representational ability as a cognitive factor underlying the suggestibility of children's eyewitness memory. The misinformation effect is used as an index of children's suggestibility, and performance on the false belief task is used as an assessment of children's representational abilities (N = 117). Analyses that considered the effect of representational ability and general memory ability on children's susceptibility to misleading information showed that differences in representational ability and general memory ability predicted participants' susceptibility to misleading information. These results demonstrate that the eyewitness memory of children who lack either multirepresentational abilities, sufficient general memory abilities, or both (i.e., most 3- and 4-year-olds) is less accurate than the eyewitness memory of children with both multirepresentational abilities and sufficient memory abilities (i.e., most 6-year-olds and adults). Thus, it appears that the earliest age at which children's eyewitness memory can be considered to be similar to that of adults is 6 years of age, when children's mental representational abilities are similar to those of adults. These results suggest that one factor underlying children's vulnerability to misleading information is the number of representations of an event that they can simultaneously hold and compare. 相似文献