Integrating relationship constructs and emotional experience into false belief tasks in preschool children

Themes of separation from attachment figures are involved when caregivers are integrated into standard theory of mind tasks in which objects or toys are located. Two experiments test the hypothesis that searching for a caregiver would interfere with false belief performance and be related to a child's emotional awareness. Experiment 1 consisted of a cross-sectional study of three- to five-year-old children administered false belief tasks related to object identity, object location, and caregiver location, i.e., false belief tasks where story characters became separated from a parent and had to locate them. As expected, there were age-related improvements in false belief performance to above-chance levels during object identity and object location tasks, but performance on the caregiver location tasks showed no age-related improvement and at age five was poorer than other tasks. Emotional integration also varied with task. Children who were relatively more aware of emotions were more likely to pass tasks involving objects, and queries of emotions during tasks were related to false beliefs about objects but not caregivers. A second study of children five years of age indicated that it was not caregivers per se that disrupted their performance on false belief tasks. Additional tasks showed that this finding was due to caregivers being animate "behaving" objects whose relocation had been self- as opposed to other-directed, which suggests that false belief performance was related to the intent of the sought item. The developing awareness of the minds of others in five-year-olds and emotional content of the task may interfere with performance in false belief tasks that are social.     

Transforming growth factor-beta1 induces apoptotic cell death in cultured retinal endothelial cells but not pericytes: association with decreased expression of p21waf1/cip1

Building on earlier work by Pascual-Leone (1970) and Case (1985), Olson (1989; 1993) set out a theory showing how a series of incremental changes in capacity for "holding in mind" could account, in part, for children's acquisition of a theory of mind. Following Piaget (1951) infants were said to employ schemata for maintaining relations with objects and events in the presence of those events. At about 18 months children became capable of holding in mind an object so as to free the perceptual system to perceive a second object and form a relation between the two, allowing for what Piaget called the "symbolic function" and what Olson described as predication. At around 4 years, the period examined in the present study, children were said to acquire the ability to represent that predicative relation as a belief or as true or false. That was the stage at which children were said to possess a theory of mind. The present study tested the hypothesized relation between development of a theory of mind and increasing computational resources. Three-, four-, and five-year-old children's performance on a pair of theory of mind tasks was compared with that on a pair of dual processing tasks designed on the basis of Baddeley's (1986) model of working memory. The resulting correlations, as high as r = .64 between the tasks, suggest that changes in capacity to hold in mind allow the expression of, and arguably the formation of, a theory of mind.     

When speech conflicts with seeing: young children's understanding of informational priority

In a series of investigations we found that children between 3 and 5 years of age judged that an utterance (such as, "There's milk in the jug") would be ignored by a listener who had previously seen something contradictory (orange juice in the jug). However, children judged that the listener would believe the message "There's milk in the jug" when he had not previously seen inside. In these various conditions, child participants had not seen for themselves what was inside the jug, so it was impossible for their own directly perceived knowledge to contaminate their judgments of what the protagonist believed. Under these conditions, even many false-belief failers did not assume that the listener would believe whatever they themselves thought was true. Moreover, the results of control conditions suggested that children's success could not be attributed to low-level strategies. These results seem to indicate an early understanding of how people prioritize information, with the consequence that they acknowledge that one and the same message would be believed in one context but not in another.     

There's more to the picture than meets the eye: young children's difficulty understanding biased interpretation

5 experiments investigated children's understanding that expectations based on prior experience may influence a person's interpretation of ambiguous visual information. In Experiment 1, 4- and 5-year-olds were asked to infer a puppet's interpretation of a small, ambiguous portion of a line drawing after the puppet had been led to have an erroneous expectation about the drawing's identity. Children of both ages failed to ascribe to the puppet an interpretation consistent with the puppet's expectation. Instead, children attributed complete knowledge of the drawing to the puppet. In Experiment 2, the task was modified to reduce memory demands, but 4- and 5-year-olds continued to overlook the puppet's prior expectations when asked to infer the puppet's interpretation of an ambiguous scene. 6-year-olds responded correctly. In Experiment 3, 4- and 5-year-olds correctly reported that an observer who saw a restricted view would not know what was in the drawing, but children did not realize that the observer's interpretation might be mistaken. Experiments 4 and 5 explored the possibility that children's errors reflect difficulty inhibiting their own knowledge when responding. The results are taken as evidence that understanding of interpretation begins at approximately age 6 years.     

Preschoolers' use of desires to solve theory of mind problems in a pretense context

K. Bartsch and H. M. Wellman (1995) have suggested that 3-year-old children's preference to construe behavior in terms of desire may interfere with their ability to reason according to belief in standard false belief tasks. Other researchers have suggested that young children fail typical measures of theory of mind because they have a reality bias (e.g., P. Mitchell, 1994). Study 1 demonstrates that even young children are able to correctly attribute a false belief to an agent when that belief is about the status of a pretense. Study 2 shows that children find it easier to attribute a false belief when the desires of the agent are eliminated. However, Study 3 suggests that a reality bias also influences children's ability to consider beliefs. Implications for recent accounts of theory of mind development are discussed.     

The relation between individual differences in fantasy and theory of mind

The relation between early fantasy/pretense and children's knowledge about mental life was examined in a study of 152 3- and 4-year-old boys and girls. Children were interviewed about their fantasy lives (e.g., imaginary companions, impersonation of imagined characters) and were given tasks assessing their level of pretend play and verbal intelligence. In a second session 1 week later, children were given a series of theory of mind tasks, including measures of appearance-reality, false belief, representational change, and perspective taking. The theory of mind tasks were significantly intercorrelated with the effects of verbal intelligence and age statistically controlled. Individual differences in fantasy/pretense were assessed by (1) identifying children who created imaginary characters, and (2) extracting factor scores from a combination of interview and behavioral measures. Each of these fantasy assessments was significantly related to the theory of mind performance of the 4-year-old children, independent of verbal intelligence.     

Overly literal interpretations of speech in autism: understanding that messages arise from minds

Children with autism and children with Down's syndrome watched the following enactment. A protagonist put one item in location A and another in location B and then left the scene. Subsequently, the items were swapped the other way round. Finally, the protagonist (who remained ignorant of the swap) requested the item in A. The observing child participant was asked to judge (1) which item the protagonist wanted and (2) which item the protagonist put in A. Unlike children with Down's syndrome, those with autism made more errors in judging that the speaker wanted the item in B than in judging that the item the speaker put in A is now in B; children with autism wrongly tended to interpret utterances literally, and they did this significantly more frequently than children with Down's syndrome. We conclude that children with autism have a difficulty making nonliteral interpretations that cannot be explained as (1) a realist bias, (2) an inability to inhibit a prepotent response, and (3) a failure to keep track of the exchange of items.     

Ruse and representations: On children's ability to conceal information.

Reports a marked development between the ages of 3 and 5 yrs in children's ability to conceal information. In a situation of high-affect involvement, 3-yr-olds did not know to misinform or withhold information from a competitor who always chose the object for which they themselves had previously stated a preference. Although only 29% of 3-yr-olds knew to influence the competitor's mental state, 87% knew to physically exclude the competitor. There was no difference between children's performance when trying to obtain the object for themselves or predicting what a story character would do. The success of the older children in concealing information indicated their new representational understanding that to influence another's behavior, one must influence that person's mental state. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Children's use of looking behavior as a cue to detect another's goal

Three studies examined children's understanding of the role that looking behavior plays in revealing another's desired goal. In each study, participants were asked which of 2 objects a protagonist wanted to obtain. Four-year-olds did not infer that an object examined via prolonged looking was more likely to be the protagonist's goal than an object that was either glanced at or inadvertently touched. Instead, they were accurate only when the protagonist looked at one of two potential goals. In contrast, the majority of 6-year-olds (and adults in Experiment 1) consistently regarded prolonged looking as the more important cue of the protagonist's goal. These age differences suggest that development is characterized by an increasing appreciation that goal is revealed by comparative differences in the quality of perceptual connectedness to objects in the world. One explanation for these age differences is that preschoolers are limited in their understanding of the difference between perceiving with full attention and without it.     

Second-order parallel processing: Visual search for the odd item in a subset.

Visual search tasks in which participants searched for an odd element in a subset of items were investigated. Participants searched for an item of odd orientation in the red subset. The target was a red line of X°, distractors were green lines of X° and red lines of Y°. The orientations, X and Y, changed on every trial. In this task, orientation information was useful only after color had been used to select the relevant subset. Results show that response time (RT) and error data were different from standard color X orientation conjunction searches (Experiment 1). RT?×?Set Size functions had slopes near 0 ms per item (Experiment 2). The selection of the subset appeared to take 200-300 ms (Experiments 2 and 3). Subset selection was based on properties of the relevant subset, not the irrelevant subset (Experiment 4). It was more difficult (perhaps impossible) to select a subset defined by 2 colors (Experiment 5). Random variation in an irrelevant dimension did not disrupt subset search (Experiment 6). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Mother-child participation in conversation about the past: relationships to preschoolers' theory of mind

Forty 3.5 to 4.5-year-olds discussed 3 past events with their mothers and completed a set of theory of mind tasks indexing their ability to reason about conflicting mental representations and their understanding of knowledge. Semipartial correlations and analyses of covariance showed that children's theory of mind scores were related to their participation in memory conversations, independent of age and linguistic skill. The frequency with which mothers provided new information was related to children's theory of mind scores, although mothers' direct replies to children were generally unrelated to children's understanding of mind. This research takes an important step toward examining the relevance of theory of mind skills to real-world, social interaction. The results have implications for explaining the emergence of autobiographical memory.     

Understanding the intentions of others: Re-enactment of intended acts by 18-month-old children.

Investigated whether children would re-enact what an adult actually did or what the adult intended to do. In Experiment, 1 children were shown an adult who tried, but failed, to perform certain target acts. Completed target acts were thus not observed. Children in comparison groups either saw the full target act or appropriate controls. Results showed that children could infer the adult's intended act by watching the failed attempts. Experiment 2 tested children's understanding of an inanimate object that traced the same movements as the person had followed. Children showed a completely different reaction to the mechanical device than to the person: They did not produce the target acts in this case. Eighteen-mo-olds situate people within a psychological framework that differentiates between the surface behavior of people and a deeper level involving goals and intentions. They have already adopted a fundamental aspect of folk psychology—persons (but not inanimate objects) are understood within a framework involving goals and intentions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Mother–child participation in conversation about the past: Relationships to preschoolers' theory of mind.

Forty 3.5- to 4.5-year-olds discussed 3 past events with their mothers and completed a set of theory of mind tasks indexing their ability to reason about conflicting mental representations and their understanding of knowledge. Semipartial correlations and analyses of covariance showed that children's theory of mind scores were related to their participation in memory conversations, independent of age and linguistic skill. The frequency with which mothers provided new information was related to children's theory of mind scores, although mothers' direct replies to children were generally unrelated to children's understanding of mind. This research takes an important step toward examining the relevance of theory of mind skills to real-world, social interaction. The results have implications for explaining the emergence of autobiographical memory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Returning to the scene: Reminders and context reinstatement enhance children's recall.

Two studies examined the efficacy of context reinstatement as a reminder in enhancing 5- to 7-year-old children's recall. In Experiment 1, children who had been interviewed shortly after an event were reinterviewed 6 months later. Children exposed to a context reminder 24 hr before the 6-month interview and children interviewed in the event context did not differ but reported significantly more information in a verbal interview than children receiving a standard interview. A control group experienced the reminder but not the event and established that the effects of the reminder were not due to new learning. There was no effect of the reminder on accuracy and no effect in reenactment. In Experiment 2, children were interviewed for the first time after 6 months, and effects of the reminder were found for both verbal recall and reenactment. Nonverbal reminders may effectively enhance the amount of information children report without decreasing accuracy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Semantic constraints on word learning: proper names and adjectives

4 experiments examined 3- and 4-year-olds' interpretations of novel words applied to familial objects in the sentence frame, "This Y is X," where X is a novel word, and Y is a familiar basic-level count noun (e.g., "dog," "cup"). These novel words are ambiguous and could be interpreted either as proper names (e.g., "Fred") or as adjectives/mass nouns (e.g., "red"/"lead"). The experiments addressed 2 questions. First, do children appreciate that the words can be construed either as proper names referring to individuals or as adjectives/mass nouns referring to salient properties/material kinds? The results showed that children could easily make either interpretation. Second, what factors affect children's tendency to make either a proper name or an adjective/mass noun interpretation? In the experiments, children learned the novel words for a range of animals and artifacts. Most children who learned the words for typical pets (e.g., a bird) made proper name interpretations, as did the majority of those who learned the words for certain non-pet animals (e.g., a caterpillar) described as possessed by someone, but only about half of those who learned the words for such non-pet animals not so described. Very few children who learned the words for either simple (e.g., a shoe) or complex (e.g., a boat) artifacts made proper name interpretations. The results provide clear evidence of the role of semantic information in constraining children's interpretation of a novel word, and they help to refine an understanding of what counts as a nameable individual for preschoolers.     

Young children's judgments of relative mass of two objects in a head-on-collision event

The purpose in this study was to investigate the ability of young children to judge the relative mass of two objects depicted on a CRT monitor as colliding head-on with each other, and to determine which feature of a collision event they depend on for their judgments. In the first experiment it was shown that half of the 4-year-olds and most of the 5-year-olds and 6-year-olds consistently judged the slower object to be heavier when the velocities of the two objects before collision were the same and those after collision were different. In the second experiment young children's judgements of relative mass in noncollision events in which two objects only moved in opposite directions at different speeds were examined. Results showed that half of the 5-year-olds and most of the 6-year-olds tended to assume consistently that the slower object was heavier. However, the 4-year-olds did not show any clear tendency. The third experiment was planned to examine young children's judgments of relative mass in different collision events in which only the precollision velocities of two colliding objects were different: half of the 6-year-old children judged the slower object to be heavier, but the rest of them and half of the 5-year-old children consistently gave the opposite responses. These were based upon the delay between the starts of motion of the two objects. The 4-year-olds did not show any tendency, as in experiment 2. The results indicate that young children can specify the kinetic information about relative mass from the kinematics of collision events when viewing an appropriate collision event, and that both the precollision phase and the postcollision phase contribute to the judgement of relative mass.     

Effects of discrete emotions on young children's suggestibility.

Two experiments investigated the effects of sadness, anger, and happiness on 4- to 6-year-old children's memory and suggestibility concerning story events. In Experiment 1, children were presented with 3 interactive stories on a video monitor. The stories included protagonists who wanted to give the child a prize. After each story, the child completed a task to try to win the prize. The outcome of the child's effort was manipulated in order to elicit sadness, anger, or happiness. Children's emotions did not affect story recall, but children were more vulnerable to misleading questions about the stories when sad than when angry or happy. In Experiment 2, a story was presented and emotions were elicited using an autobiographical recall task. Children responded to misleading questions and then recalled the story for a different interviewer. Again, children's emotions did not affect the amount of story information recalled correctly, but sad children incorporated more information from misleading questions during recall than did angry or happy children. Sad children's greater suggestibility is discussed in terms of the differing problem-solving strategies associated with discrete emotions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Children's use of the common ground in interpreting ambiguous referential utterances.

Common ground is contextual information shared by a listener and speaker that enables the listener to convert an ambiguous utterance to an informative communication. Four experiments examined young children's understanding of the common ground in interpreting ambiguous referential utterances. Kindergarten and 2nd-grade children and college students were read short vignettes containing statement, joint activity, status common ground, and an ambiguous or informative utterance about a display of 4–6 object drawings. The subjects were asked (a) whether the listener knew which object to pick (Experiment 1), (b) to pick an object themselves or choose "none" (Experiment 2), (c) the source of the listener's knowledge in the context or utterance (Experiment 3), and (d) whether a designated object was the "right one," the one the speaker "meant," or the one the speaker "could have meant" (Experiment 4). Even the kindergarten children used statement information effectively in interpreting ambiguous utterances, and all groups had difficulty using status information. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Young children's predictions of illness: Failure to recognize probabilistic causation.

In this study preschool-age children made predictions for a set of salient probabilistic causes. Of interest was whether the children viewed outcomes of familiar causes of illness as definite or as probabilistic. In Experiment 1, children judged that a common cause would affect all members of a group in the same way. In Experiment 2, children believed they could definitely predict illness outcomes in a single case. These judgments contrasted with adults' variable and uncertain predictions. Children did recognize uncertainty in outcomes dependent on voluntary choices. Experiment 3 presented both high- and low-potency causes of illness. Children treated all causes of illness as nonprobabilistic. These results are discussed in the context of children's understanding of causal relations and the sources of variability. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Children's memory for drawings based on a false belief.

In 3 studies, preschool children drew or saw another person draw what they wrongly thought were the contents of a box, saw the true contents, and then were asked what had been drawn and what they (or the other person) had thought was in the box. Children were more accurate at recalling drawings than beliefs. Belief judgments were no more accurate than in a control task with no drawing. Both the drawings and the initial belief represented falsely the contents of the box, yet children had much more difficulty with beliefs than with drawings and did not use their more accurate recall of drawings to help recall beliefs. These results are contrary both to the view that children have a general representational deficit and to the view that having a physical counterpart to belief helps children overcome a reality bias. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)