Beliefs about beliefs: representation and constraining function of wrong beliefs in young children's understanding of deception.

DENHAM, SUSANNE A. Social Cognition, Prosocial Behavior, and Emotion in Preschoolers: Contextual Validation. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1986, 57, 194-201. Relations among young preschoolers' social cognitive abilities, expression of emotions, and prosocial responses to others' emotions were investigated. 3 types of measures were employed with 27 2and 3-year-olds: structured social cognitive, structured assessment of response to emotion, and observational coding of response to emotion displays. Results suggested that subjects' social cognitive acuity and differential responding to emotion have heretofore been underrated. Moreover, affective knowledge was significantly related to prosocial behavior in semistructured situations. Prevalent affect was related to expression of prosocial behavior (e.g., frequent expressions of anger were associated with low levels of affective knowledge and prosocial behavior). Thus this investigation benefited from broader conceptual definitions and contextualized measures.

Social Cognition, Prosocial Behavior and Emotion in Preschoolers: Contextual Validation.

To communicate effectively, people must have a reasonably accurate idea about what specific other people know. An obvious starting point for building a model of what another knows is what one oneself knows, or thinks one knows. This article reviews evidence that people impute their own knowledge to others and that, although this serves them well in general, they often do so uncritically, with the result of erroneously assuming that other people have the same knowledge. Overimputation of one's own knowledge can contribute to communication difficulties. Corrective approaches are considered. A conceptualization of where own-knowledge imputation fits in the process of developing models of other people's knowledge is proposed.

/pdf/how-we-know-and-sometimes-misjudge-what-others-know-imputing-55yhvxl6oq.pdf

How We Know—and Sometimes Misjudge—What Others Know: Imputing One's Own Knowledge to Others

https://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/faculty/chwe/austen/keysar2003.pdf

Limits on theory of mind use in adults

26 autistic children with mental ages of 3-13 years were tested on 3 tasks that are within the capability of 3- or 4-year-old normal children. The first task tested understanding of a mistaken belief. Children were shown a typical box of a certain brand of sweets, and they all thought that it contained that kind of sweet. To their surprise, however, the box contained something else. Yet, only 4 out of the 26 autistic children were able to anticipate that another child in the same situation would make the same mistake. In contrast, all but 1 of 12 children with specific language impairment, matched for mental age, understood that others would be as misled as they had been themselves. The autistic children were also tested for their ability to infer knowledge about the content of a container from having or not having looked inside. All 4 children who had passed the belief task and an additional 4 performed perfectly, but most failed. The third task assessed children's pragmatic ability to adjust their answers to provide new rather than repeat old information. Here, too, most autistic children seemed unable to reliably make the correct adjustment. These results confirm the hypothesis that autistic children have profound difficulty in taking account of mental states.

Exploration of the autistic child's theory of mind: knowledge, belief, and communication.

MARVIN, ROBERT S.; GREENBERG, MARK T.; and MOSSLER, DANIEL G. The Early Development of Conceptual Perspective Taking: Distinguishing among Multiple Perspectives. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1976, 47, 511-514. 80 children between 2.5 and 6.5 years of age were administered a task in which they were required to distinguish among multiple conceptual points of view. The task was based on the notion of a secret, involved 3 participants, and was administered in the children's homes. Results indicated that children as young as 4 years of age could conceive of others' conceptual points of view in a non-egocentric fashion. The results were discussed in terms of the nature and context of perspective-taking tasks, and of the development of group interaction.

The Early Development of Conceptual Perspective Taking: Distinguishing among Multiple Perspectives

The literature is unclear and controversial as to when children are first able to engage in conceptual perspective taking, that is, to infer another person's thoughts, feelings, or internal states of knowledge (e.g., Borke, 1971; Chandler & Greenspan, 1972). Most studies have found that children younger than 7 years of age are not able to engage in this activity. Flavell, Botkin, Fry, Wright, and Jarvis ("apple-dog story," 1968) arid Chandler and Greenspan (1972) used tasks in which the child had access to information not available to the other person. The child was then required to make an inference about the other's restricted conceptual viewpoint. In both studies it was found that most children under 9 years of age were unable to engage in veridical perspective taking. Using stimuli containing less information and requiring responses with fewer linguistic demands, a few studies have purportedly found evidence of conceptual perspective taking in children as young as 3 or 4 years of age. Borke (1971) had children select a picture to match the affective state of a hypothetical child in a story. She found that children as young as 3 years of age can correctly anticipate the other child's feelings in certain simple contexts. Borke's study has been criticized on the grounds that her task may have been measuring some social skill other than perspective taking. A young child might accurately predict that a person at a birthday party will be happy. Since it is generally shared knowledge that anyone at a birthday party is probably happy, the child need not engage in perspective taking to correctly anticipate the other's feelings. To ensure that perspective taking is required for correct performance, the task must be constructed so that the child's perspective is demonstrably different from that of the other. As Chandler and Greenspan (1972) point out, "Without this important qualification, egocentric and nonegocentric thought result in the same outcome

Conceptual Perspective Taking in 2- to 6-Year-Old Children

A 5-trial social-conditional reasoning task was administered to 20 children at each of ages 3, 4, 5, and 6 years. The results, based on four convergent measures, indicated that by 4 years of age children are able to reason from a premise to its logical conclusion in reasoning about the probable behavior of others. The results are discussed in terms of a component model of this ability as applied to real-world social situations. By 4 years of age, in relatively simple situations, children demonstrate such abilities as perspective taking (Mossier, Marvin, & Greenberg, 1976), conservation of number (Miller, Heldmeyer, & Miller, 1975), and simple transitive inferences (Riley & Trabasso, 1974). However, there still remains a paucity of data regarding early logical reasoning skills, and there is some controversy in the literature as to the criteria for determining their presence (Riley & Trabasso, 1974). Reese and Shack (1974) convincingly argue for the use of multiple convergent measures as criteria for demonstrating a particular ability. In this study we investigated preschooler's abilities to engage in a simple social-conditional reasoning task—the ability to reason from a premise to its logical conclusion. In this task the child is presented with one characteristic of an experimenter. The child is asked which of two possible activities the experimenter would want to engage in, only one being logically implied by the stated characteristic. This study complies with the methodological suggestion of Reese and Shack (1974) by using four measures of task performance: (a) judgment; (b) verbal justification; (c) latency to response (processing time); and (d) a nonsense trial where the premise does not logically imply either of the choices presented. The nonsense trial was designed to differentiate between children who operate from a premise and those who do not. Children who operate from a premise should take significantly longer to answer the nonsense question than they did for the previous logical questions. In addition, in re

Daniel G. Mossler

Papers

The Early Development of Conceptual Perspective Taking: Distinguishing among Multiple Perspectives

Conceptual Perspective Taking in 2- to 6-Year-Old Children

The development of conditional reasoning skills