L2 - Development of Theory of Mind

Question 1

What is theory of mind?

Answer 1

The insight that people hold mental states and that these govern behaviour
Mental states e.g. beliefs, desires, goals etc
Allows us to make sense of the social world to predict peoples actions

Question 2

What is desire-based ToM?

Answer 2

Do children understand that other people may have desires that differ from theirs?
People’s desires are idiosyncratic and constantly changing
18 month old understood the experimenter’s desires food differed from theirs but not 14 month old
Suggests they understand that desire is a subjective mental state that can differ from person to person

Question 3

What is the belief-based ToM?

Answer 3

Distinction between mind/world
Requires the notion that a person has a representation of the world
The contents may be quite different from the contents of the world or from our beliefs
Shift from a situation based to a representation based understanding

Question 4

How can we test if someone has a ToM?

Answer 4

False belief task - tests whether child can represent what another person believes in contrast to their own beliefs or reality

Question 5

What is the unexpected transfer task - or maxi task - method?

Answer 5

Wimmer and Perner 1983

Maxi puts his chocolate in the cupboard
Whilst he is outside playing his mum takes it from the cupboard and puts it in the fridge
Test Q - Where will Maxi look for the chocolate?
Memory Q - Where did Maxi put the chocolate? Where did mum put his chocolate?

> 5 yrs judge that Maxi will look in cupboard due to a false belief and he doesn’t know that it is a fridge
< 5 yrs judge that Maxi will look in the fridge because that is where they would look (egocentric bias)

Question 6

What is a true belief task?

Answer 6

True belief task - tests whether child can represent what another person believes when that belief matches their own belief

Question 7

What is the deceptive box task?

Answer 7

Perner 1987
- What is inside the tube? (guess)
- What is in it? (see)
- What will your friend say is inside the box? (predict)
Another child would also hold the false belief

Gopnik and Astington 1988
- When you first saw this tube, before we opened the it, what did you think was inside the box?
- 3-4 yr old have difficulty acknowledging false belief in other and own prior false belief

Question 8

How can we interpret the findings?

Answer 8

3 yrs usually fail FB task
4 yrs usually pass FB task
Traditionally taken as evidence that around this time children acquire a theory of mind
Radical conceptual shift and stage like development around 4 years

Question 9

Do we know that 3 yr olds don’t have ToM ?

Answer 9

Lack of evidence does not mean lack of competence
Performance limitations masking children’s competence
Language problems?
Simplifying the task improves performance slightly

Question 10

What did Wellman, Cross and Watson 2001 find?

Answer 10

Meta-analysis of 178 studies
<3.5yrs below chance
>4yrs above chance
Type of task was irrelevant and made no difference
Deceptive motive, active participation, salience of mental state improves performance

Question 11

What did Callaghan et al 2005 find about cross-cultural comparisons?

Answer 11

Despite leading very different lives, children showed similar developmental shift between 3 and 5 years

Question 12

What are the factors contributing to ToM development?

Answer 12

1. Role of social experience in aiding the understanding of mental states - arises from interactions from other people
2. Biological maturation enables children to express their understanding of mental states - arises from improvement in executive functioning

Question 13

What is the role of experience?

Answer 13

Harris 1999
- Conversations in general are crucial for exposing children to other people’s perspective
- Hearing what people are doing, thinking, planning on doing etc
- They provide children with the vocabulary needed to discuss and reflect on mental states

Question 14

What are some pieces of evidence for the role of experience?

Answer 14

Children with older siblings show earlier ToM (Perner, Ruffman and Leekham,1994)
Children whose parents talk about mental states understand false belief earlier (Dunn 1991)
Deaf children of hearing parents show a developmental lag (Peterson and Siegal 1995)

Question 15

What is the theory of mind scale?

Answer 15

Wellman and Liu 2004
Diverse desiring - people can have different desires for the same thing
Diverse beliefs - people can have different beliefs about the same situation (don’t know who is right or wrong)
Knowledge-access - something can be true, but someone might not know that
False beliefs - something can be true, but someone might falsely believe something different
Hidden emotion - someone can feel one way but display a different emotion

Question 16

What are the cross cultural differences for the ToM scale?

Answer 16

Wellman 2006
Children in western countries - DD - DB - KA - FB - HE
Chinese and Iranian children - DD - KA - DB - FB - HE

Question 17

What is the role of executive functioning?

Answer 17

Children’s failures on ToM tasks may stem from problems translating conceptual knowledge into successful action
Critical role of executive functions in ability to pass ToM tasks

Question 18

What are executive functions?

Answer 18

A set of domain-general cognitive abilities that help us to control and guide our attention and behaviour
- Inhibition (ignoring distractions, stopping from eating the chocolate): stroop task or dragon task
- Cognitive flexibility (responding to something depending on context, multiple passwords): wisconsin card test
- Working memory (holding important information, mental shopping list): digit span, spatial span

Question 19

What are the biological constraints of executive function?

Answer 19

The frontal lobes of the brain are very important for executive functions
They take a long time to develop
Important developments in inhibitory control (IC) take place in the first 6 years of life
Diamond and Taylor 1996

Question 20

What is the role of EF in false belief tasks?

Answer 20

Evidence of strong positive correlation between children’s inhibitory control and FB performance
Suggests that development in IC and ToM may be related
IC may be a crucial enabling factor for ToM development, affecting both the emergence and expression of mental state knowledge

Question 21

What is explicit knowledge?

Answer 21

Knowledge easily accessible to the child
Measured via elicited responses e.g. verbal answer

Question 22

What is implicit knowledge?

Answer 22

Knowledge the child is unaware of
Measured via spontaneous response e.g. emotional response, anticipatory looking, violation of expectancy

Question 23

What is the Moll 2016 method for understanding FB?

Answer 23

Investigating children’s facial expressions as indices of their belief understanding
Predict that if a 3 yr old perceive the conflict between a person’s belief and reality, they will show sings of suspense e.g. lip biting when observing false belief

Question 24

What are the results for Moll 2016 implicit understand of FB?

Answer 24

Found greater instances of expressed tension in the false belief
- Suggest 3 yrs expressed knowledge of another’s false belief and recognised affective consequences
In contrast, performance on classic FB task was poor and unrelated to the amount of expressions they displayed while watching the FB videos
- Expressions are independent from emerge

Question 25

What is the anticipatory looking paradigm?

Answer 25

Used to determine if infants can predict events in the world
- Measure the direction of child’s first look after an event
- PS looking behaviour is analysed to determine if they correctly anticipate what will happen next
- Requires prediction

Direct measure - ‘Which box will he open first?’
Indirect measure - Record child’s eye gaze

Question 26

What are the implicit measure results for anticipatory looking?

Answer 26

86% children over 2yr11m showed looking pattern indicative of FB understanding
3yr old looked to correct location but gave incorrect answer
Data suggests that children develop implicit understanding of false belief before explicit
Perform much better implicitly

Question 27

What is the violation of expectancy method?

Answer 27

Familiarise infant to an event
Present test behaviour that is either consistent or inconsistent
If they look for longer at inconsistent they take it as being surprised
Indicates some level of knowledge about what should happen

Question 28

What did Onishi and Baillergeon 2015 find for looking time and violation of expectancy?

Answer 28

Looking longer when expectation violated
Suggests infants expect people to search for objects consistent with their belief about the object location, not where the objects are in reality

Question 29

What is the dual route model?

Answer 29

Just a theoretical model (Apperly and Butterfill 2009)
System 1 - automatically processes and makes judgements about people’s mental states, fast, everyday and error prone
System 2 - requires skills, slow, cognitively demanding, effortful,, complex decisions and reliable