摘要:

Preschoolers often fail a false‐belief test. Competing explanations have been offered from two perspectives: the theory of mind and the theory of reasons for action. A concept which unifies the two has been overlooked—the concept of a ‘need to know’, whereby someone has a reason for directing actions to the goal of forming a mental representation. Current tests that present the actor as a passive information user rather than an active information collector might underestimate preschoolers' conception of psychology.In Expt 1, a theory of mind test presented a false belief as the outcome of an actor's plan of action involving her need to know something. Preschoolers showed 85 per cent success when the test took the form of hide‐and‐seek, whilst success in a standard false‐belief test was 48 per cent. In Expts 2 and 4 it was found that success was not due to a low level heuristic: in the former, asking children to act out the plan of action gave 94 per cent success compared with 66 per cent from a modified standard task. Success from conventional verbal questioning was reliably lower. Further probes revealed flexibility; in a true‐belief test children recognized that the actor's plan would succeed, and in an ignorance test (Expt 3) they showed understanding that the seeker would not know where to search.We suggest that traditional tests underestimate preschoolers in two ways. One is in neglecting practical intelligence in favour of verbal questioning. The other is in challenging them with tests which pose an inferential problem about the intentionality of the actor and thus disturb children's ‘intentional stance’. Traditional tests reveal an important limitation on preschoolers' use of a theory of mind but not an organizational gap in their constru

ISSN:0261-510X    

DOI:10.1111/j.2044-835X.1991.tb00867.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:1991

数据来源: WILEY

摘要:

This study examined conditions under which 3‐year‐olds can conceptualize ignorance, false belief, and representational change, and assessed the order of emergence of these three abilities. One hundred and twenty children between 2:11 and 4:1 were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: standard, explanation, and trick. In the standard condition, children were administered a standard false belief task. In both experimental conditions, the discrepancy between children's false expectation and reality was highlighted. In the explanation condition, children were also given an explanation of the source of a false belief. In the trick condition, the questions were placed in the context of a deceptive game. None of the experimental manipulations affected the younger subjects (2:11‐3:7). However, for the older subjects (3:8‐4:1), performance on the ignorance question was significantly elevated by both the highlight alone and a combination of the highlight with either explanation or trick; performance on the false belief question was significantly elevated by the highlight alone; and performance on the representational change question was significantly elevated by a combination of the highlight plus explanation. Thus, only children over 3:7 can be helped to pass the standard ignorance and false belief questions. Finally, contrary to previous findings, all three kinds of understandings emerged simultaneously, suggesting that all require a similar level of representational

ISSN:0261-510X    

DOI:10.1111/j.2044-835X.1991.tb00868.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:1991

数据来源: WILEY

摘要:

The ability of 3‐ to 5‐year‐old children to deceive a competitor in a hiding game was studied in three experiments in a paradigm similar to the one introduced by Woodruff&Premack (1979) for the study of deception in chimpanzees. The first two experiments showed a significant increase with age in the frequency of deceptive pointing, with children below the age of about 3 1/2 years consistently failing to deceive a competitor even under very conducive conditions. The third experiment showed that two deception tasks (deceptive pointing and telling a lie) were significantly more difficult for 3‐ to 4‐year‐old children than parallel ‘sabotage’ tasks (i.e. tasks testing the ability to physically prevent a competitor from gaining a reward). These findings are consistent with previous research on false belief representation in indicating a conceptual deficit in 3‐year‐old children. They are discussed with regard to recent controversies on the early acquisition

ISSN:0261-510X    

DOI:10.1111/j.2044-835X.1991.tb00869.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:1991

数据来源: WILEY