True or false: Do 5-year-olds understand belief?

In 3 studies (N = 188) we tested the hypothesis that children use a perceptual access approach to reason about mental states before they understand beliefs. The perceptual access hypothesis predicts a U-shaped developmental pattern of performance in true belief tasks, in which 3-year-olds who reason about reality should succeed, 4- to 5-year-olds who use perceptual access reasoning should fail, and older children who use belief reasoning should succeed. The results of Study 1 revealed the predicted pattern in 2 different true belief tasks. The results of Study 2 disconfirmed several alternate explanations based on possible pragmatic and inhibitory demands of the true belief tasks. In Study 3, we compared 2 methods of classifying individuals according to which 1 of the 3 reasoning strategies (reality reasoning, perceptual access reasoning, belief reasoning) they used. The 2 methods gave converging results. Both methods indicated that the majority of children used the same approach across tasks and that it was not until after 6 years of age that most children reasoned about beliefs. We conclude that because most prior studies have failed to detect young children's use of perceptual access reasoning, they have overestimated their understanding of false beliefs. We outline several theoretical implications that follow from the perceptual access hypothesis. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A comparison of young children's understanding of contradictory representations in pretense, memory, and belief

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.     

Reasoning With Premises That Are Not Empirically True: Evidence for the Role of Inhibition and Retrieval.

Two studies examined conditional reasoning with false premises. In Study 1, 12- and 16-year-old adolescents made "if-then" inferences after producing an alternative antecedent for the major premise. Older participants made more errors on the simple modus ponens inference than did younger ones. Reasoning with a false premise reduced this effect. Study 2 examined the relation between performance on a negative priming task (S. P. Tipper, 1985) and reasoning with contrary-to-fact premises in 9- and 11-year-olds. Overall, there was a correlation between the relative effect of negative priming on reaction times and the number of knowledge-based responses to the reasoning problems. The results of these studies are consistent with the idea that reasoning with premises that are not true requires an interaction between information retrieval and inhibition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Early reasoning about desires: Evidence from 14- and 18-month-olds.

Although there is substantial evidence that 30-mo-old children can reason about other people's desires, little is known about the developmental antecedents of this ability. A food-request procedure was devised to explore this understanding in 14- and 18-mo-olds. Children observed an experimenter expressing disgust as she tasted 1 type of food and happiness as she tasted another type of food. They were then required to predict which food the experimenter would subsequently desire. The 14-mo-olds responded egocentrically, offering whichever food they themselves preferred. However, 18-mo-olds correctly inferred that the experimenter wanted the food associated with her prior positive affect. They were able to make this inference even when the experimenter's desires differed from their own. These data constitute the first empirical evidence that 18-mo-olds are able to engage in some form of desire reasoning. Children not only inferred that another person held a desire, but also recognized how desires are related to emotions and understood something about the subjectivity of these desires. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Children's attention to beliefs in interactive persuasion tasks.

Whether and when children can apply their developing understanding of belief to persuasion was examined using interactive puppet tasks. Children selected 1 of 2 arguments to persuade a puppet to do something (e.g., pet a dog) after hearing the puppet's belief (e.g., "I think puppies bite"). Across 2 studies, 132 children (ages 3-7 years) engaged in these persuasion tasks and in false-belief reasoning tasks, presented in puppet and story formats. Belief-relevant argument selection increased with age, as did appropriate reasoning about false beliefs, and occurred more in puppet than story tasks. Results suggest that improvements in belief reasoning in early childhood may be reflected in social interactions such as persuasion. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Difficulté des jeunes enfants à comprendre la dissimulation des émotions.

The authors investigated the understanding of emotion dissimulation in school-age children. Sixty participants were read short stories in which a main character expressed an emotion or hid an emotion from other characters. The participants were asked to identify the emotion felt by the main characters and to indicate the facial expressions they would display. Then they were asked what emotions the main characters felt while they were displaying these expressions, and what the beliefs of the other story characters would be as to the emotion felt by the main characters. The results revealed that children from 5 to 6 years of age have a partial understanding of emotion dissimulation. They were accurate in finding the emotion felt by the main characters when questioned the first time. They were also accurate in choosing the expressions the main characters would display to hide their emotions. However, they were often inaccurate as to the felt emotions of the main characters when questioned the second time. Compared with 9- and 10-year-olds, the younger children had more difficulty understanding the simultaneous character of felt and displayed emotions. Five- and 6-year-olds were also less accurate than the older children when asked to indicate the beliefs of the other characters in stories where felt emotions were hidden. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Foreknowledge, caring, and the side-effect effect in young children.

Children and adults often judge that the side effects of the actions of an uncaring story agent have been intentional if the effects are harmful but not if these are beneficial, creating an asymmetrical "side-effect" effect. The authors report 3 experiments involving 4- and 5-year-olds (N = 188) designed to clarify the role of foreknowledge and caring in judgments of intentionality. Many children showed the side-effect effect even if agents were explicitly described as lacking foreknowledge of the outcome. Similarly, when agents were described as possessing foreknowledge but their caring state was unspecified, children more often judged that the negative, compared with the positive, effects of agents' actions were brought about intentionally. Regardless of foreknowledge, children infrequently judged positive outcomes as intentional when agent caring was unspecified, and they gave few attributions of intentionality when agents were described as having a false belief about the outcome. These results testify to the robustness of the side-effect effect and highlight the extent to which children's intentionality judgments are asymmetrical. The findings suggest developmental continuity in the link between reasoning about morality and intentionality. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Analogical reasoning in young children.

Assessed the performance of 4- and 5-year-olds on geometric analogy tasks. Each task consisted of 16 analogy problems that were presented in a manipulative, gamelike context and that used attribute blocks that varied on the dimensions of color, size, and shape. Experiment 1 demonstrated that many of the preschoolers were capable of applying analogical reasoning in the solution of geometric analogy problems of the form A:B::C:?. We also found that children who did not consistently reason analogically showed evidence of a reasoning strategy that was governed by a hierarchical rule structure. Experiment 2, in which a modified version of the geometric analogy task in Experiment 1 was used, confirmed the findings of the initial experiment with regard to the analogical reasoning ability of 4- and 5-year-olds. The rule structure was verified for nonanalogical reasoners, whereas analogical reasoners generally exhibited no consistent pattern in their response errors. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Preschoolers' understanding of the link between thinking and feeling: cognitive cuing and emotional change

In 3 studies we investigated 3- through 6-year-olds' knowledge of thinking and feeling by examining their understanding of how emotions can change when memories of past sad events are cued by objects in the current environment. In Study 1, 48 4-, 5-, and 6-year-olds were presented with 4 illustrated stories in which focal characters experience minor sad events. Later, each story character encounters a visual cue that is related to one of his or her previous sad experiences. Children were told that the character felt sad, and they were asked to explain why. Study 1 suggested considerable competence as well as substantial development in the years between 4 and 6 in the understanding of the influence of mental activity on emotions. Studies 2 and 3 more systematically explored preschoolers' understanding of cognitive cuing and emotional change with different types of situations and cues. Across these 2 studies, 108 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds listened to illustrated stories that featured story characters who each experienced a sad event and who were later exposed to a related cue. Children were not only asked to explain why the characters suddenly felt sad, but in some stories, they were also asked to predict and explain how another character, who was never at the past sad event, would feel. Results of Studies 2 and 3 showed an initial understanding of cognitive cuing and emotion in some children as young as 3, replicated and extended the evidence for significant developmental changes in that understanding during the preschool years, and revealed that the strength and consistency of preschoolers' knowledge of cognitive cuing and emotion was affected by whether cues were the same, or only similar to, parts of the earlier events.     

Continuity and the persistence of objects: when the whole is greater than the sum of the parts

In three experiments, a total of 480 participants heard a version of the story of the ship of Theseus (Hobbes, 1672/1913), in which a novel object, labeled with a possessive noun phrase, underwent a transformation in which its parts were replaced one at a time. Participants then had to decide which of two objects carried the same possessive noun phrase as the original: the one made entirely of new parts (that could be inferred to be continuous with the original) or one reassembled from the original parts (that could not be inferred to be continuous with the original). Participants often selected the object made of new parts, despite the radical transformation. However, the tendency to do so was significantly stronger (1) if the object was described as an animal than if it was described as an artifact, (2) if the animal's transformation lacked a human cause than if it possessed one, and (3) if the selection was made by adults or 7-year-olds than if it was made by 5-year-olds. The findings suggest that knowledge about specific kinds of objects and their canonical transformations exerts an increasingly powerful effect, over the course of development, upon people's tendency to rely on continuity as a criterion for attributing persistence to objects that undergo change.     

Reality Compared With Its Alternatives: Age Differences in Judgments of Regret and Relief.

Three experiments examined developmental change in children's understanding of regret and relief, two second-order emotions whose quality depends on a comparison between reality and "what might have been." In Experiment 1, participants 7 years of age and older, but not 5-year-olds, made regret-related emotion-response judgments that took into account a comparison of reality with its alternatives. In Experiment 2, 5-year-olds judged that an individual would feel better, rather than worse, when a counterfactual outcome was better than what actually occurred (the opposite of the pattern found with older children and adults). Experiment 3 focused on the understanding of relief. In contrast to the findings from Experiment I, the 7-year-olds in Experiment 3 made their judgments solely on the basis of what actually occurred. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The promise of multimedia stories for kindergarten children at risk.

This research focuses on the ability of book-based animated stories, when well designed and produced, to have positive effects on young viewers' narrative comprehension and language skills. Sixty 5-year-olds, learning Dutch as a 2nd language, were randomly assigned to 4 experimental and 2 control conditions. The children profited to some extent from repeated encounters with a storybook with static pictures but more from repeated encounters with the animated form of the story. Both story formats were presented on a computer screen; both included the same oral text spoken in the same voice but the animated story was supplemented with multimedia features (video, sounds, and music) dramatizing the events. Multimedia additions were especially effective for gaining knowledge of implied elements of stories that refer to goals or motives of main characters, and in expanding vocabulary and syntax. The added value of multimedia books was strengthened over sessions. In a group from families with low educational levels who were lagging in language and literacy skills, multimedia storybooks seem to provide a framework for understanding stories and remembering linguistic information. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Selective information seeking after a single encounter.

In 3 experiments, the authors examined whether a single act of testimony can inform children's subsequent information seeking. In Experiment 1, participants saw one informant give a correct and another informant give an incorrect answer to a question, assessed who was right (wrong), and decided to whom to address a 2nd question. Adults and 7-year-olds but not 4-year-olds selected the previously correct informant. In Experiment 2, after assessing which informant was (not) very good at answering, even 4-year-olds selected the previously correct informant. In Experiment 3, in the absence of external demands to evaluate the informants, 7-year-olds and adults still selected the previously correct informant. Thus, a single encounter is sufficient for 7-year-olds and adults to engage in selective information seeking and trait labels enable 4-year-olds to do so too. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Development of elementary deductive reasoning in young children.

This study examined the claim (J. Hawkins et al; see record 1984-25517-001) that young children can reason deductively with content for which "practical knowledge is irrelevant." Ss 6, 8, and 11 years of age were given a set of standard logical syllogisms and a matching set of illogical ones. Six-year-olds gave similar responses to and used similar types of justifications for both logical and illogical forms, indicating that correct performance on the former might be accounted for by a low-level matching strategy, not necessarily by deductive reasoning. A clear developmental pattern emerged, showing that the ability of children to differentiate responses to the two forms improves over this age period. However, the number of children able to explicitly describe illogicality remained small, even among 11-year-olds. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Adult age differences in autobiographical reasoning in narratives.

Two studies examined age differences in autobiographical reasoning within narratives about personal experiences. In Study 1 (n=63), people completed brief interviews about turning points and crises in their lives. Older participants were more likely to narrate crises in ways that connected the experience to the speaker's sense of self, that is, to show autobiographical reasoning. This increase was primarily evident in young adulthood and midlife. In Study 2 (n=115), adults provided written narratives about heterogeneous autobiographical experiences. Age was associated with linear increases in the likelihood of autobiographical reasoning. The results are discussed in terms of narrative approaches to self-development across the life span. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Application of the Act Special Admissions in Psychiatric Hospitals; balance between respect for autonomy and acting in the patient's best interest

Three years after the implementation of the Dutch Act on Compulsory Admission to Psychiatric Hospitals an evaluation was made. It shows that the law has reinforced the patients' rights to self-determination, but that actual practice is not yet fully according to the law. For the latter the reporters blame the complexity of the law and the inadequate manner in which the law was introduced. An evaluation of the effects of a similar law in the USA puts this issue in a different light. It shows that caregivers and judges do not let the patient's rights to autonomy prevail if this is not in the patient's best interests. The right to self-determination, expected in the sixties and seventies to become a revolution in psychiatry appears to be merely 'a near-revolution'. The moral importance of caring for a psychiatric patient outweighs the respect for his or her right to self-determination.     

Children's use of mental state information in selecting persuasive arguments.

Whether and when children use information about others' mental states to invent or select persuasive strategies were examined. In Study 1, preschoolers, 3rd-graders, and 6th-graders (ns?=?11, 12, and 16, respectively; 17 girls) were told about story characters' persuading parents to buy pets or toys. Children were either given or not given information about story parents' beliefs and asked to invent or select appropriate arguments. Older children, but not preschoolers, used belief information to select arguments. Results were replicated in Study 2 (16 kindergartners, 16 3rd-graders; 19 girls). In Study 3, kindergartners and 1st-graders (N?=?16; 6 girls) reasoned well on false-belief tasks but not on persuasion tasks, suggesting that failure to consider mental states in persuasion was not due to lack of a belief concept. Findings suggest that mental state understanding may continue to develop after the preschool years; methodological qualifications are also considered. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Hemispheric contributions to nonverbal abstract reasoning and problem solving.

Hemispheric involvement in reasoning abilities has been debated for some time, and it remains unclear whether the right hemisphere's involvement in problem solving is modality specific or dependent on the type of spatial reasoning required. In the current study, 2 types of nonverbal reasoning abilities were examined, spatial reasoning and proportional reasoning, in 109 patients with cerebrovascular disease that was confined to either the right or the left hemisphere or was diffuse in nature. Results indicated that no lateralizing effects were present based on type of spatial reasoning. Findings are consistent with the suggestion that higher order cognitive processes involved in nonverbal abstraction and problem solving are not strongly lateralized to the right hemisphere but rather are more generally distributed throughout the cortex. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)