Developmental psychology
Chapter 11
Acquiring a theory of mind

Introduction

Unlike other creatures, humans are able to marshal vast intellectual resources in an effort to connect with other people.
In non-humans, social behavior might have a great deal to do with instinct.

Early attunement to others’ minds

The ability to connect with other minds is present early in development.
Before long, the relationship is cemented when the baby shows a range of social responses.

Intuitive psychology: the awareness some people have regarding other’s desires, motives and beliefs, they appear able to anticipate others’ reactions and behavior.

Focusing on false beliefs: the unexpected transfer test

If we ask a participant to make judgments about another person’s true beliefs, they would respond correctly even in the absence of knowing anything about other minds.

Unexpected transfer test: a measure of theory of mind in which a child sees an object put in one place and it is later moved to another location without the child being aware of it. The theory-of-mind question is ‘where will the child look for the object when they want to find it?’

A reason for focusing on false beliefs is because it is important for children to be attuned to false as opposed to true beliefs.

When do children begin to understand that people hold beliefs?

Piaget characterized children below 7 years as egocentric.

But,
Wimmer found that from about 4 or 5 years, children set aside their own knowledge in making correct attributions of other people’s false beliefs.
Children negotiate a radical conceptual shift around the time of their fourth birthday, which equips them with a representational theory of mind that allows them to acknowledge false belief.

Do children acquire a theory of mind?

Children rapidly develop in their understanding of the mind at about 4 years of age.

The deceptive box test

According to Gopnik, understanding other minds by a process of simulation is implausible.
Being able to find out what someone else thinks by working out what you yourself would think in that situation depends on having reflective access to your own states of mind.
Meta-cognition: knowledge of one’s state of mind, reflective access to one’s cognitive abilities, thinking about how one is feeling or thinking.

Gopnik found that children below 4 years of age have just as much difficulty accessing their own states of belief as they have in estimating another person’s.

Deceptive box task: in which a child sees that a box (usually of a well-known brand of sweets/candy) which they thought contained sweets/ candy actually contains pencils, and when asked, ‘What did you originally think was in the box?’ children under age of 4 will typically say ‘pencils’.
Children who correctly recalled their prior false belief, tended to be the same who judged correctly that someone else could have a false belief.

Gopnik argued that whether or not children could imagine what they would think in a different situation was not the issue. If children do not know their own mind, they cannot use insights into their own mind as a basis for working out what another person thinks.
Accordingly, their difficulty in understanding the mind seems to lie at a more fundamental level.
Gopnik suggests that children have to acquire a naive theory of the mind, a theory which gives access to their own states of belief as well as other people’s.

Is there a developmental state?

Some argue that there is a developmental stage in the sense that children move onto a radically different level of understanding at about 4 years of age once they acquire the principles for explaining and predicting other people’s behavior.

The case for gradual change

Evidence which suggests that children younger than 4 years might be capable of acknowledging false belief and also that sometimes older individuals, including adults, make systematic errors when trying to infer what another person is thinking.

• Success depends on the challenge presented by the demand of the particular task in question.

The assumption is that gradual changes that occur with development improve the probability that the child will give a correct judgment, but this also depends on task demands.

Do children suddenly begin giving correct judgments of false belief?

When performing on a test of false belief, you an either answer correctly or incorrectly. The test is incapable of detecting degrees of performance that fall somewhere in between.
We should enquire focusing on the probability of the child passing the test at any given time. It might become apparent that the probability increases gradually between 3 and 5 years of age.

Data reported by Gopnik suggests that children are variable in their performance at about 4 years of age.
There were many instances of children passing one test of false belief and failing another.
Giving a correct judgment in a test of false belief does not guarantee future success.
Longitudinal studies indicate that the number of false belief tests that a child is likely to pass increases very gradually with age.

There is a possibility that 3-year-old children are capable of the same kind of processing as older children when it comes to working out what other people might be thinking, but tend to make errors in performance of task.
We need to recognize a distinction

• Performance
• Competence

If younger children engaged in the same kind of processing then a clue to this effect might apparent in how long they take to respond to the question about another person’s belief.
Kikuno found that children aged 3 and 4 years tended take longer to answer questions about another person’s false belief than they took to answer questions about the true state of reality.
Apparently, the children had not worked out what the protagonist was thinking automatically and only began to do that when promoted by the test question.

Kinkuno found that children took as long to reply to a question about the protagonist’s belief whether their answer was correct or incorrect.
These findings are consistent with the possibility that children engage in the same kind of processing irrespective of whether they got the answer right or wrong.
Seemingly, the younger children differed form older ones not in their level of competence, but in being more prone to errors in performance.

Understanding the question asked

Children might not differ from each other in how they understand the mind, they might differ drastically in how they interpret questions.
The younger children might not be clear on the point in time the question refers to.
A modified question gives children a better change of answering right.

Signs of competence during infancy: can infants understand false belief?

Evidence seems to suggest that performance factors might mask early signs of competence in very young children’s understanding of other people’s minds.
Children below 3 years might understand that minds hold beliefs about the world, among other things, they do not always demonstrate this level of competence under certain test conditions, perhaps because they have to remember too much of the information in the stories that are typically used.

Children as young as 15 months showed signs of understanding false belief in a preferential looking procedure involving violation of expectation.

Adults’ difficulty with false beliefs

There is evidence that adults sometimes have difficulty acknowledging false belief.
Hindsight bias: the inclination to see events that have already happened as being more predictable than they were before they took place.

There is a possibility that people do not automatically attune to other people’s beliefs.
Adult participants took longer to respond to a question about a protagonist’s false belief than they took to respond to a question about the true state of reality.
It seems like that while participants could easily work out what a protagonist was thinking, this is something that they did not do automatically.

Factors that influence development

Nature versus nurture

When making judgments about beliefs, we need to resist the lure of current reality and we must not fall victim to the hindsight bias.
The ability to do this is not all or nothing. Success is more common among older participants.

It seems that subtle differences in how people understand others’ mind can vary between cultures.
Collectivistic versus individualistic.
It seems that cultural values can impact upon one’s level of trust in others which in turn perhaps impacts on how one evaluates what other people are thinking.

Are we equipped with a dedicated module in he brain for understanding other minds?

Modularity: the view that we have separate modules for different abilities.
Fordor suggestion: module is demonstrably active at a younger age in tasks that have a different form from the standard test of false belief, although supporting evidence for his specific predictions is somewhat scant.

Normally developed young children possess the relevant module but at 3 years of age are yet to acquire the general processing skills to give a correct judgment in any task that had the form of a test of false belief.
The problem is the form of the problems makes demands on processing that are beyond the performance abilities of a typical 3 year old.
This can even be if it is not a mind-related task.
So long as children could acknowledge a counterfactual state, they had no further difficulty in identifying this as a false belief held by another person.

The evidence suggests that whether or not children succeed in acknowledging false belief depends on more than the activity of a special brain module dedicated to the task. Children with autism might have a more specific difficulty with false belief that is associated with their difficulty connecting to other people.

The main problem with modularity account is that it implies that calculating what other people think is something we do automatically, but this seems not to be the case. Also, cultural influences.

The role of the family: siblings

Variations are also apparent across different kinds of family.
A child with many siblings would encounter the potentially beneficial experience of exposure to other points of view. But this might be a socially uncomfortable or even annoying experience. It could have cognitively beneficial spin-offs in terms of becoming better with other minds.

But perhaps children become attuned to other minds not through the experience of a clash of perspectives with siblings, but by being formally tutored about the mind by wiser individuals. The potentially beneficial adult input can be defined in large families. With the consequence that each child would not be receiving the optimum level of tutoring about the mind.

The number of siblings correlates negatively with the child’s intelligence quotient score, as does birth order. These birth order IQ differences are very small.
Zajonc suggests that intellectual development depends partly on beneficial parental input.

Children aged 3 years who had siblings were more likely to pass a test of false belief.
Those with several siblings stood a better change of giving a correct judgment than those with just one or two siblings. But only those with older siblings.

The role of family: adults

Adults who are mind minded are beneficial for children’s knowledge of false belief.

The characteristics of the child

The characteristics of the child and the environment probably interact in complex ways with respect to the influence they have on development.
The characteristics of the child are likely to shape the way people respond to them, which in turn will impact upon the extent to which social input is beneficial.

Autism

Wing’s trait of impairments: impairments of:

• Social relationships
• Communication
• Imagination

Lack of imagination

The lack of imagination is manifest in many ways. Notably in pretend play.
Leslie suggested that the kind of mental processing require for pretense is the same as that needed to understand states of belief.
A person who did not have the ability to disengage form reality in pretense probability would not be able to disengage from reality in order to acknowledge a false belief.
Individuals with autism have difficulty with pretence is in itself a striking clue to the possibility that they might be unable to attune to other minds.

Socialization and communication

Underdevelopment in socialization and communication also point to an underlying deficiency in understanding other minds.
Social skill depends on being able to diagnose other people’s sensitivities, attitudes and knowledge.

Causes of autism

At least one of the causes of autism has genetic origin.
Other causes arise form accidental injury or virus infection. These various factors could lead to an abnormality in the brain that forms the neurological seat of autism.

Failure to understand the mind

There are reasons for thinking that children with autism might be delayed in developing and understanding of the mind.
Evidence:

• Difficulty with false belief is associated with autism
• Difficulty in acknowledging false belief is not confined to any particular version of the standard test for children with autism.

It is invalid to argue that autism is the product of a failure to understand the mind as defined by inability to acknowledge beliefs.
Nonetheless, individuals with autism are likely to be developmentally delayed.
Verbal mental age is a good predictor of whether or not a person with autism will succeed in acknowledging false belief, but is seems that verbal mental age has to be substantially higher in autism than in typically developing children.
For false belief, it seems a minimal verbal mental age of 7 years is often required in autistic development.

What is the purpose of a theory of mind?

By the time most people become adults they will have acquired a highly developed ability to make psychological inferences about other people, even if their mental processes are subject to bias.
Two benefits:

• Being able to sense how another person is feeling will enable use to offer the right kind of help and support as appropriate.
• If we can work out what happened to cause the psychological state in question, then effectively the other person’s mind offers a window onto things that we cannot sense directly. It broadens our consciousness of what is going on in the world.