共查询到20条相似文献，搜索用时 31 毫秒
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 attribution of action to beliefs and desires 总被引：4，自引：0，他引：4
When and how children understand beliefs and desires is central to whether they are ever childhood realists and when they evidence a theory of mind. Adults typically construe human action as resulting from an actor's beliefs and desires, a mentalistic interpretation that represents a common and fundamental form of psychological explanation. We investigated children's ability to do likewise. In Experiment 1, 60 subjects were asked to explain why story characters performed simple actions, such as looking under a piano for a kitten. Both preschoolers and adults gave predominantly psychological explanations, attributing the actions to the actor's beliefs and desires. Even 3-year-olds attributed actions to beliefs and false beliefs, demonstrating an understanding of belief not evident in previous research. In Experiment 2, 24 3-year-olds were tested further on their understanding of false belief. They were given both false belief prediction and explanation tasks. Children performed well on explanation taks, attributing an anomalous action to the actor's false belief, even when they failed to predict correctly what action would follow from a false belief. We concluded that 3-year-olds and adults share a fundamentally similar construal of human action in terms of beliefs and desires, even false beliefs. 相似文献
3.
Schult CA 《Child development》2002,73(6):1727-1747
Much of the previous research on children's understanding of intentions confounded intentions with desires. Intentions and desires are different, in that a desire can be satisfied in a number of ways, but an intention must be satisfied by carrying out the intended action. Children 3 through 7 years of age and adults were presented with situations in which intentions were satisfied but desires were not, or vice versa, in a story-comprehension task (N = 71) and a target-hitting game (N = 45). Although 3- and 4-year-olds were unable to differentiate desires and intentions consistently, 5- and 7-year-olds often matched the adult pattern. Younger children's difficulties in understanding intentions are discussed in terms of their use of a desire-outcome matching strategy and the representational complexities of intentions. 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.
On belief-desire reasoning tasks, children first pass tasks involving true belief before those involving false belief, and tasks involving positive desire before those involving negative desire. The current study examined belief-desire reasoning in participants old enough to pass all such tasks. Eighty-three 6- to 11-year-olds and 20 adult participants completed simple, computer-based tests of belief-desire reasoning, which recorded response times as well as error rates. Both measures suggested that, like young children, older children and adults find it more difficult to reason about false belief and negative desires than true beliefs and positive desires. It is argued that this developmental continuity is most consistent with either executive competence or executive performance accounts of the development of belief-desire reasoning. 相似文献
6.
《Early childhood research quarterly》1996,11(3):405-424
This study investigated the instructional strategies mothers used when interacting with their child on a concept-learning task and the effect of this interaction on subsequent independent child performance. Also investigated was whether mothers' behaviors and perceptions differed depending on the child's age, task difficulty, or the child's needs for assistance. Sixty 3- and 5-year-old children participated in a three-phase sequence of tasks that required the matching of opposite concepts. The pretest and posttest phases were identical for all children, but during the second phase half the children completed the tasks with their mothers and half continued to work independently. During each phase, children received both an easy and a difficult version of the task. Children who interacted with their mothers matched more concepts correctly on the posttest and gave more correct explanations for their matches than children who worked independently. Mothers of 3-year-olds provided more assistance than mothers of 5-year-olds, and mothers provided higher levels of assistance on the difficult task than on the easy task. Most mothers were sensitive to their child's needs in that the instructional strategies they adopted throughout the interaction were appropriately modified in response to their child's successes and failures. There was some evidence that individual differences in maternal sensitivity were related to variations in children's independent performance. Mothers' perceptions of the task, of their child's needs for assistance, and of their own role in the interaction were related to their overt behaviors. Intervention programs aimed at fostering parents' skills in interacting with their children should emphasize the importance of scaffolded instruction tuned to the child's capabilities. 相似文献
7.
8.
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
9.
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
10.
Children's magical explanations and beliefs were investigated in 2 studies. In Study 1, we first asked 4- and 5-year-old children to judge the possibility of certain object transformations and to suggest mechanisms that might accomplish them. We then presented several commonplace transformations (e.g., cutting a string) and impossible events (magic tricks). Prior to viewing these transformations, children suggested predominantly physical mechanisms for the events and judged the magical ones to be impossible. After seeing the impossible events, many 4-year-olds explained them as "magic," whereas 5-year-olds explained them as "tricks." In Study 2, we replaced the magic tricks with "extraordinary" events brought about by physical or chemical reactions (e.g., heat causing paint on a toy car to change color). Prior to viewing the "extraordinary" transformations, children judged them to be impossible. After viewing these events, 4-year-olds gave more magical and fewer physical explanations than did 5-year-olds. Follow-up interviews revealed that most 4-year-olds viewed magic as possible under the control of an agent (magician) with special powers, whereas most 5-year-olds viewed magic as tricks that anyone can learn. In a third study, we surveyed parents to assess their perceptions and conceptions of children's beliefs in magic and fantasy figures. Parents perceived their children as believing in a number of magic and fantasy figures and reported encouraging such beliefs to some degree. Taken together, these findings suggest that many 4-year-olds view magic as a plausible mechanism, yet reserve magical explanations for certain real world events which violate their causal expectations. 相似文献
11.
Friedman WJ 《Child development》2001,72(2):460-473
Previous studies of the concept of entropy have indicated that before 7 to 9 years of age, children have difficulty understanding the effects of randomizing forces and often predict highly improbable events, such as a return to the original ordered state. In the present research, 306 children between 3 and 11 years of age were asked directly whether undifferentiated forces, such as the wind or objects being thrown into the air, could create order or disorder in a set of objects. The results showed that even 4-year-olds are sensitive to the asymmetrical effects of such events. Older children apply this principle more consistently and are able to use it in explaining their answers. 相似文献
12.
Nerida F. Ellerton 《Educational Studies in Mathematics》1986,17(3):261-271
As part of a large scale mathematics study, students were asked to make up a mathematics problem that would be difficult for a friend to solve. They were also asked to solve the problem themselves. A sub-sample of 11- to 13-year-olds was interviewed while they worked through the items in the study.The problems made up by a group of eight more able and eight less able children from this sub-sample are reported here, together with the comments the children made during the interviews about their respective problems.The results highlight features of the problems made up by the two groups of children. In general, the more able children made up problems of greater computational difficulty, with more complex number systems and with more operations than their less able peers. In addition, there is evidence to suggest that the more able students planned their problems and were able to work out the answer, while their less able peers had difficulty with both the planning and the solution of their own problems.As the substance and style of the problem made up by each child uniquely reflects that child's mathematical experiences and ideas, the made up problem is a particularly useful tool for studying mathematically talented children for whom routine tasks are usually completed quickly and accurately. 相似文献
13.
14.
Two preregistered studies tested how 5- to 6-year-olds, 7- to 8-year-olds, and adults judged the possibility of holding alternative beliefs (N = 240, 110 females, U.S. sample, mixed ethnicities, data collected from September 2020 through October 2021). In Study 1, children and adults thought people could not hold different beliefs when their initial beliefs were supported by evidence (but judged they could without this evidential constraint). In Study 2, children and adults thought people could not hold different beliefs when their initial beliefs were moral beliefs (but judged they could without this moral constraint). Young children viewed moral beliefs as more constrained than adults. These results suggest that young children already have sophisticated intuitions of the possibility of holding various beliefs and how certain beliefs are constrained. 相似文献
15.
自闭症儿童心理理论能力中的情绪理解 总被引：5，自引：0，他引：5
情绪理解在个体社会交往中发挥着重要的作用,在社会交往上存在障碍的自闭症儿童的情绪理解能力理应是值得关注的研究领域。本文综述了以往对自闭症儿童心理理论能力的研究,从情绪与愿望、信念之间关系的角度对自闭症儿童基于愿望和信念的情绪理解力进行分析,并探讨了理解不同类别情绪时自闭症儿童表现不同的原因。 相似文献
16.
Researchers are divided over whether young children understand other people's minds. This study reexamines the main technique used to show a basic inability in 3-year-olds to make judgments about a person's thoughts when that person's knowledge happens to be false. 131 children, aged 3, 3 1/2, and 4, were shown the real, unexpected contents of a chocolate box and were required to say what a friend would think was in it and what their own previous expectations had been. Success in this task was compared between the 3 age groups and also according to the specificity of questions asked. It was found, in contrast to previous findings, that test questions that are temporally specific and syntactically straightforward enable most 3-year-olds to attribute false beliefs to others. These results suggest that 3-year-olds' access to information about others' mental states is bounded by the linguistic demands placed upon them, but long before their fourth birthday children have some understanding of others' mind. 相似文献
17.
Even when they have good language skills, many children with hearing loss lag several years behind hearing children in the ability to grasp beliefs of others. The researchers sought to determine whether this lag results from difficulty with the verbal demands of tasks or from conceptual delays. The researchers related children's performance on a nonverbal theory of mind task to their scores on verbal aptitude tests. Twelve French children (average age about 10 years) with severe to profound hearing loss and 12 French hearing children (average about 7 years) were evaluated. The children with hearing loss showed persistent difficulty with theory of mind tasks, even a nonverbal task, presenting results similar to those of hearing 6-year-olds. Also, the children with hearing loss showed a correlation between language level (lexical and morphosyntactic) and understanding of false beliefs. No such correlation was found in the hearing children. 相似文献
18.
To effectively self-regulate learning, children need to self-evaluate whether they meet learning goals. Unfortunately, self-evaluations are often inaccurate, typically, children are overconfident. We investigated two explanations for developmental progression in self-evaluations related to children's (48 5/6-year-olds and 53 7/8-year-olds) interpretations of performance: Improved reliance on item difficulty, and reduced sensitivity to self-protection biases. Self-evaluations were more accurate for 7/8-year-olds than for 5/6-year-olds. There was no developmental increase in reliance on item difficulty; even 5/6-year-olds made adaptive use of this cue. Both age groups were overconfident for incorrect responses, but were able to use performance feedback to improve confidence judgments. However, when self-rewarding, 5/6-year-olds were less likely to take negative performance feedback into account than 7/8-year-olds. The 5/6-year-olds were able to base confidence judgments on performance feedback, but did not use feedback to the same extent when self-rewarding. This may indicate that self-protective biases are an important cause of overconfidence in children. 相似文献
19.
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
20.
Mother and infant talk about mental states relates to desire language and emotion understanding 总被引：3，自引：0，他引：3
This study assessed the relation between mother mental state language and child desire language and emotion understanding in 15-24-month-olds. At both time points, mothers described pictures to their infants and mother talk was coded for mental and nonmental state language. Children were administered 2 emotion understanding tasks and their mental and nonmental state vocabulary levels were obtained via parental report. The results demonstrated that mother use of desire language with 15-month-old children uniquely predicted a child's later mental state language and emotion task performance, even after accounting for potentially confounding variables. In addition, mothers' tendency to refer to the child's over others' desires was the more consistent correlate of mental state language and emotion understanding. 相似文献