Cognitive Development

Flashcards on Cognitive Development and Theory of Mind.

Theory of Mind (Wellman, 2018)

Agents engage in acts that will get them what they think they want. Those beliefs and desires are grounded by perceptions and basic emotions.

Theory of Mind

A set of interrelated concepts (desires, beliefs, emotions) that allow children to generate explanations, make predictions, and act and react.

Infant Expectations of Agents (Spelke, 2022)

Infants expect agents to have internal forces that allow them to move autonomously and perceive things at a distance to direct actions to goals.

Passing the False Belief Task

Requires ignoring one's own knowledge and taking the perspective of another person.

3-4 year olds and the Maxi Task

Children wrongly predict that Maxi will search in the new place.

5 year olds and the Maxi Task

Children correctly predict that Maxi will search in the old place.

W.E.I.R.D.

Children from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic societies.

False Belief Task - Meta Analysis

There is a robust developmental change in understanding false belief that holds across different conditions and procedures.

Around 4-years of age

Talk about beliefs becomes as frequent as talk about desires.

Between 3 and 5 years of age, children realize:

People, especially when deprived of full perceptual access, can hold a false belief.

False Belief vs. Theory of Mind

Understanding that people can have false beliefs is a small part of Theory of Mind.

3-month-old infants

Expect agent actions to be intentional, goal-directed, perceptually guided, efficient, and causal.

6-month-old children

Understand goal-directed action and interpret reaching as object-directed.

12-month-old infants

Understand that emotional reactions reflect desires and can use this information to predict people’s behavior.

3-year-olds

Understand the connection between perceiving and knowing.

5-7 year olds

Understand that we may experience emotions that are different from what we portray.

8-10 year olds

Understand that what we say may be different from what we think, including non-literal communication like sarcasm.

Tentative Hypothesis (Harris, 1996)

Children come to an explicit understanding of beliefs through conversation.

Peterson & Siegal (2000)

Children deprived of linguistic input do poorly on false belief tasks.

Mental State Terms

Helps children identify and pay attention to differences in knowledge and beliefs and provides the linguistic tools to represent false belief.

Children from China, Iran, and Turkey

Knowledge Access is mastered before Diverse Beliefs.

Consequence of Theory of Mind

ToM consistently and significantly predicts better peer acceptance.

Consequence of Theory of Mind

ToM predicts social maturity, leadership skills, and skills for joining groups of peers.

Consequence of Theory of Mind

Children with greater ToM scores are better liars.

Autism: Kannerʼs (1943) diagnosis

Have difficulty in making relationships, difficulty with play and make-believe, are slow to acquire language and remain poor at communication and tend to insist on certain routines.

Baron-Cohen, Leslie and Frith (1985)

Theory of Mind difficulties seem unique to children with Autism

Risk factors of autism

An absence of pretend play and a lack of joint attention