challenge
Explain the emergence in development
of mindreading.
of mindreading.
The challenge is to explain the developmental emergence of mindreading.
Let me explain.
Here's the really surprising thing.
Children do really badly on this until they are around four years of age.
And they seem to develop the ability to pass this task only gradually, over months or years.
(There's something else that isn't surprising to most people but should be: adult humans not only nearly always provide the answer we're calling 'correct': they also believe that there is an obviously correct answer and that it would be a mistake to give any other answer. I'll return to this point later.)
Wimmer & Perner, 1983
(NB: The figure is not Wimmer & Perner's but drawn from their data.)
There's been some stuff in the press recently about bad science, mainly some dodgy methods and failures to replicate.
So you'll be pleased to know that a meta-study of 178 papers confirmed Wimmer & Perner's findings.
Wellman et al, 2001 figure 2A
Now there is clearly some variation here.
That's because different researchers implemented different versions of the original task.
We can use the meta-analysis of these experiments as a shortcut to finding out what sorts of factors affect children's performance.
One factor that seems to make hardly any difference is whether you ask children about others' beliefs or their own beliefs.
To repeat, you get essentially the same results whether you ask children about others' beliefs or their own beliefs.
Children literally do not know their own minds.
Wellman et al, 2001 figure 5
What happens if we involve the child by having her interact with the protagonist?
The task becomes easier for children of all ages, but the transition is essentially the same
(participation does not interact with age \citealp[pp.\ 665-7]{Wellman:2001lz}).
Wellman et al, 2001 figure 6
Finally, although there are some cultural differences, you get the same transition in seven diferent countries.
Wellman et al, 2001 figure 7
3-year-olds’ performance is not simply the result of performance factors.
After all, they succeed on structurally similar tasks about
pretence, saying or desiring.
[ASIDE ON EF] Further, changing the EF demands of a FB task doesn’t affect performance,
and, conversely, nor do differences between cultures in EF affect FB
performance.
Consistently with this, success on FB predicts later social competence
independently of EF.
But then what about the developmental relation between EF and FB performance?
It's emergence not performance (?).
challenge
Explain the emergence in development
of mindreading.
of mindreading.
So our challenge was to explain the emergence of mindreading.
At this point, up until around, it seemed quite straightforward to most researchers.
We seemed to know that children are unaware of mental states until around four years.
And a lot of studies looked at which factors affect their acquiring this awareness.
These studies showed that executive function, language and rich forms of social
interaction are all important.
All of this supported something like the story that Sellars tells in his famous Myth of
Jones.
Three-year-olds systematically fail to predict actions \citep{Wimmer:1983dz}
and desires \citep{Astington:1991kk} based on false beliefs; they similarly
fail to retrodict beliefs \citep{Wimmer:1998kx} and to select arguments
suitable for agents with false beliefs \citep{Bartsch:2000es}.
They fail some low-verbal and nonverbal false belief tasks
\citealp{Call:1999co,low:2010_preschoolers,krachun:2009_competitive,krachun:2010_new}; they fail whether the question concerns others' or their own (past)
false beliefs \citep{Gopnik:1991db}; and they fail whether they are
interacting or observing \citep{Chandler:1989qa}.