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Class notes on Children understanding other's minds, developmental psychology

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Full class notes on Children's understanding of other's minds, week 6

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  • April 5, 2021
  • 5
  • 2019/2020
  • Class notes
  • Dr rory devine
  • All classes
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Introduction to Developmental Psychology
Children’s Understanding of Other’s Minds
Theory of Mind  the capacity to attribute mental states (such as desires, beliefs,
knowledge) to others in order to predict or explain behaviour.
 Mentalizing
 Mindreading
 Empathy
 Social cognition
 Perspective taking
Piaget on children’s social development
 Pre-operational stage (2-7 years): conversations between children are egocentric
o Child does not attempt to understand the point of view of the hearer.
o Focuses on themselves rather than being able to see it from someone else’s
perspective
 Contrasts with socialised speech
o Child attempts to understand/influence the hearer
o They start to ask about what other people want rather than just thinking
about what they want
 “There is no social life between children of less than 7 or 8 years” (Piaget, 1959,
p.41)
 Domain general view of development: inability to ‘decentre’.
 Model of Mountains
o Have a doll and the child has to see whether they can identify the doll’s
perspective
 They were more likely to be able to hide the teddy from the robber at a younger age
compared to having to identify the doll’s point of view
Meta-representation
 Children have to imagine that people are able to imagine different things to them
 He argued that being able to understand that other people have different beliefs and
desires to us is the hallmark of being able to understand other people’s minds
 Daniel Dennett
o Looked at Punch and Judy shows
o Every time punch did something that Judy wasn’t aware of, they found that
all children laughed
The false-belief task
 See a boy hide his teddy in a basket and he then leaves the room
 His sister then comes and moves the teddy out of the basket and into a box
 The boy then comes back in from playing and the child watching the scenario is
asked where they think the boy will look for the teddy

, The truth about false belief
 Between 30 months and about age 5 children’s performance goes above chance
levels – they point correctly to the correct location
Why all the fuss about mindreading?
 Children who are better at mindreading in early childhood are:
o More likely to be rated by parents/teachers as prosocial
o More likely to be rated as popular about peers
o More likely to be rated as socially competent at the end of primary school by
their teachers
Nativist accounts
 Mindreading is innate, domain-specific skill
 Children are hard-wired to track the mental states of others
 Development occurs as a result of specialised modules (each capable of processing
different types of mental states) coming online as we mature.
 You are not born able to reason about other people’s minds but you are born ready
to develop this skill
Evidence for nativist theories
 Mindreading is universal: it occurs in all humans
 Specialised mechanism with evidence for specific impairments
o Children with autism but not children with intellectual disability fail the false
belief test
 Mindreading emerges in infancy
Can infants reason about false beliefs?
 Baillargeon said that Piaget was completely wrong about object permanence
because the task he used was too hard
 She argued that the false belief task was too difficult for children to really show how
good they were at mind reading thoughts and feelings
 She created a Violation of Expectations task
 VofE looked at how the children reacted when something unexpected occurred
 Baillargeon found that the children looked longer at the unexpected events
compared to the ones that they expected
 She argued that the children had an innate ability to recognise that people can have
different beliefs to reality
 Challenges
o Children could use simple ‘behaviour rules’ rather than ToM, e.g., people look
for things where they last saw them
o Implicit knowledge ≠ explicit understanding
o Two systems for mindreading: early-emerging, inflexible system vs. late-
emerging, flexible system

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