ISSN:0261-510X    

DOI:10.1111/j.2044-835X.1991.tb00857.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:1991

数据来源: WILEY

ISSN:0261-510X    

DOI:10.1111/j.2044-835X.1991.tb00858.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:1991

数据来源: WILEY

摘要:

This is a state‐of‐the‐art review of children's understanding of the mind. It examines both empirical evidence and explanatory theories. Considering evidence, the key issue of children's understanding of false belief is first discussed. Then other evidence for children's folk psychological understanding is summarized, from late infancy to the end of the preschool period. Considering explanations, the dominant idea in the field, the ‘heory theory’, is discussed first. Then five other perspectives are considered: enculturation, nativism, folk psychology based on procedural knowledge, on experience, or on scripts. The positions, and the empirical predictions each would make, are compared. The paper concludes with a synthesis of the different views and a brief consideration of where the field

ISSN:0261-510X    

DOI:10.1111/j.2044-835X.1991.tb00859.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:1991

数据来源: WILEY

摘要:

The purpose of this paper is to argue against the view that young children develop a ‘theory’thatpeople have minds, and to suggest reasons why children's concepts of the mind and of mental states are not adequately characterized as ‘theoretical’ in nature. I propose that what children acquire is knowledge of persons with minds, and that they do so through experience of interpersonal relations. I emphasize that infants' capacity for personal relatedness, the psychological bedrock for their understanding of persons, is partly constituted by innately determined perceptual‐affective sensibilities towards the bodily appearances and behaviour of others. It is likely that children come to make inferences in the course of enriching and systematizing their concepts of mind, but this does not justify the view that ‘mental states’ are hypothetic

ISSN:0261-510X    

DOI:10.1111/j.2044-835X.1991.tb00860.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:1991

数据来源: WILEY

ISSN:0261-510X    

DOI:10.1111/j.2044-835X.1991.tb00861.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:1991

数据来源: WILEY

摘要:

A series of experiments is reported which show that three successive mechanisms are involved in the first 18 months of life in ‘looking where someone else is looking’. The earliest ‘ecological’ mechanism enables the infant to detect the direction of the adult's visual gaze within the baby's visual field but the mother's signal alone does not allow the precise localization of the target. Joint attention to the same physical object also depends on the intrinsic, attention‐capturing properties of the object in the environment. By about 12 months, we have evidence for presence of a new ‘geometric’ mechanism. The infant extrapolates from the orientation of the mother's head and eyes, the intersection of the mother's line of sight within a relatively precise zone of the infant's own visual space. A third ‘representational’ mechanism emerges between 12 and 18 months, with an extension of joint reference to places outside the infant's visual field.None of these mechanisms require the infant to have a theory that others have minds; rather the perceptual systems of different observers ‘meet’ in encountering the same objects and events in the world. Such a ‘realist’ basis for interpersonal knowledge may offer an alternative starting point for development of intrapersonal knowledge, rather than the view that mental events can only be known by

ISSN:0261-510X    

DOI:10.1111/j.2044-835X.1991.tb00862.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:1991

数据来源: WILEY

摘要:

Four studies were done to test the hypothesis that, although knowledgeable about some important facts concerning visual perception, 3‐year‐olds have not yet learned that lines of sight must always be straight. Subjects of 3 to 5 years of age were asked whether they (Study 1) or toy observers (Studies 2–4) would be able to see objects via looking paths that were curved rather than straight: for example, by looking through a bow‐shaped hollow tube or along the curve of its outside wall. Consistent with the hypothesis, 3‐year‐olds gave no evidence of possessing this straight‐line‐of‐sight rule. In contrast, 5‐year‐olds showed at lea

ISSN:0261-510X    

DOI:10.1111/j.2044-835X.1991.tb00863.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:1991

数据来源: WILEY

摘要:

Two stages have been suggested in children's understanding of the mind between ages 4 and 8. The first stage is signalled by success on false belief tasks around age 4 and is thought to indicate an understanding of the mind as ‘representational’. The second stage is signalled by success on ambiguity tasks around age 6–8 and is thought to indicate a new understanding that people ‘interpret’ or ‘process’ perceptual information. The study reported here was carried out with 108 subjects aged 3–6 to determine whether children begin to understand that ambiguous visual cues are an insufficient source of knowledge around age 6 as previous research suggests (e.g. Taylor, 1988), or whether this development occurs around age 4 when they begin to understand related tasks such as false belief. Two differently coloured (unambiguous) and two same coloured (ambiguous) stuffed animals were introduced to a subject and another character. The animals from one pair were then secretly placed in two separate boxes which had a small hole in the centre enabling a viewer to see each animal's colour but not the shape. Almost no 3‐year‐olds, but about half the 4‐year‐olds and most 5‐ and 6‐year‐olds, recognized that the other could identify the unambiguous pair, but not the ambiguous pair. It is argued that an understanding of ambiguity develops around age 4 because it requires an understanding that beliefs may be false, and that there is one stage (at least with respect to the

ISSN:0261-510X    

DOI:10.1111/j.2044-835X.1991.tb00864.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:1991

数据来源: WILEY

摘要:

Estes, Wellman&Woolley (1989) have shown that children as young as 3 years of age can distinguish between mental entities such as an image or dream of an object and a real object. Nevertheless, children often show persistent fear of imaginary creatures, particularly monsters (Jersild, 1943). To find out what conception children have of such imaginary creatures, 4‐ and 6‐year‐olds were questioned about three types of item: real items (e.g. a cup), ordinary imagined items (e.g. an image of a cup) and supernatural imagined items (e.g. an image of a monster). In two experiments, both age groups sharply differentiated the real items from both types of imagined item. Despite this apparently firm grasp of the distinction between fantasy and reality, two further experiments showed that 4‐ and 6‐year‐olds are not always certain that a creature that they have imagined cannot become real. Having imagined a creature inside a box, they show apprehension or curiosity about what is inside the box, and often admit to wondering whether the creature is actually inside. The experiments suggest that children systematically distinguish fantasy from reality, but are tempted to believe in the existence of what they have mere

ISSN:0261-510X    

DOI:10.1111/j.2044-835X.1991.tb00865.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:1991

数据来源: WILEY

摘要:

The present study was concerned with children's ability to identify a prior expectation of their own as false belief. In Expt 1 a sharp improvement was found between 3 years and 5 years not only in the ability to identify own beliefs but also in the explanation of what caused that belief and in the ability to infer another person's belief from exposure to misleading information. Experiment 2 ruled out that 3‐year‐olds' failure with belief identification was due to a memory problem or to a misunderstanding of the test question. Experiment 3 excluded the further possibility that 3‐year‐olds simply failed belief identification because of embarrassment about having said something false. The younger children's difficulty with the identification of own beliefs contradicts Wimmer, Hogrefe&Sodian's (1988) proposal that young children's difficulty in understanding another person's false belief is solely due to a failure to understand informational origins of beliefs. The present finding also speaks against the Cartesian assumption that the mind is transparent to itself, an assumption which underlies the perspective taking tr

ISSN:0261-510X    

DOI:10.1111/j.2044-835X.1991.tb00866.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:1991

数据来源: WILEY