Children's Interpretation of Messages from a Speaker with a False Belief

Robinson, Elizabeth; Mitchell, Peter

doi:10.2307/1131352

Cited by 22 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…Baron-Cohen, 1988;Happe, 1993), a difficulty understanding about beliefs could account for this. The message-desire discrepant task (Mitchell & Isaacs, 1994;Robinson & Mitchell, 1992, 1994 illustrates precisely how a lack of understanding of behef could result in overly hteral interpretations. In this procedure, the participant watches a scenario such as the following.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Overly Literal Interpretations of Speech in Autism: Understanding That Messages Arise from Minds

Mitchell

Saltmarsh

Russell

1997

Child Psychology Psychiatry

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Children with autism and children with Down's syndrome watched the following enactment. A protagonist put one item in location A and another in location B and then left the scene. Subsequently, the items were swapped the other way round. Finally, the protagonist (who remained ignorant of the swap) requested the item in A. The observing child participant was asked to judge (1) which item the protagonist wanted and (2) which item the protagonist put in A. Unlike children with Down's syndrome, those with autism made more errors in judging that the speaker wanted the item in B than in judging that the item the speaker put in A is now in B; children with autism wrongly tended to interpret utterances literally, and they did this significantly more frequently than children with Down's syndrome. We conclude that children with autism have a difficulty making nonliteral interpretations that cannot be explained as (1) a realist bias, (2) an inability to inhibit a prepotent response, and (3) a failure to keep track of the exchange of items.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Overly Literal Interpretations of Speech in Autism: Understanding That Messages Arise from Minds

Mitchell

Saltmarsh

Russell

1997

Child Psychology Psychiatry

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“…The mixed pattern of results is further confused by the fact that even within Western cultures performance on naïve psychology tasks is not uniform within age (e.g., Wellman and Estes, 1986;Wellman and Bartsch, 1988;Bartsch and Wellman, 1989;Chandler et al, 1989;Flavell et al, 1990;Lewis and Osborne, 1990;Freeman et al, 1991;Mitchell and Lacohee, 1991;Siegal and Beattie, 1991;Robinson and Mitchell, 1992;Moses, 1993;Sullivan and Winner, 1993;Chandler and Hala, 1994;Carlson et al, 1998;Surian and Leslie, 1999). This could be attributed to a range of methodological issues but also raises the possibility of important within-culture variations in naïve psychology.…”

Section: Cultural Universals and Differences In Naïve Psychologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Cross-Cultural Variations in Naïve Psychology among 2-year-olds: A Comparison of Children in the United Kingdom and Singapore

Lim¹,

Williams²,

Cebula

et al. 2010

J Cogn Cult

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Children's understanding of naïve psychology is the main focus of this study. Research evidence suggests that 2-and 3-year-olds understand some aspects of naïve psychology. By 4 years, they develop internal representations of mental states. Previous studies have also reported crosscultural variations in naïve psychology development. The majority of this research has focused on Western individualistic societies such as Australia, Europe and North America, and Eastern collectivism societies such as China and Japan. Singapore with its blend of Eastern and Western values represents a unique case for comparison with Western societies. This paper reports a crosscultural study of young children's developing understanding of naïve psychology in Edinburgh, UK and Singapore. It addresses three main questions: (a) Are there cross-cultural differences in the development of naïve psychology?; (b) What are children's performance sequences on naïve psychology tasks?; and (c) Are naïve psychology concepts coherent? The participants were 87 children from the UK (n=43, mean age 2 years 4 months) and Singapore (n=44, mean age 2 years 5 months). This study incorporated several established tasks of pretence, desires, emotions, perceptions, appearance-reality and false-beliefs to investigate children's understanding of non-representational and representational mental states. The results showed no gross crosscultural differences. However, significant cultural differences in performance on two tasks and differences in the coherence of naïve psychology concepts were identified. The results highlight the importance of considering subtle cultural influences on children's developing understanding of various aspects of naïve psychology.

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“…Another possibility points to the linguistic complexity of the stories and the tests used in the experiments described above. The test questions involved multiple embedded clauses, which also may impose too heavy a load on the child's capacities of processing linguistic input (Robinson and Mitchell, 1992;de Villiers and Pyers, 2002;Perner et al, 2002;Sprung et al, 2007;Kamawar and Olson, 2011;Rakoczy et al, 2015;Rakoczy, 2017).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Development of Understanding Opacity in Preschoolers: A Transition From a Coarse- to Fine-Grained Understanding of Beliefs

et al. 2020

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Intensionality (or opacity) is a core property of mental representations and sometimes understanding opacity is claimed to be a part of children's theory of mind (evidenced with the false belief task). Children, however, pass the false belief task and the intensionality tasks at different ages (typically 4 vs. 5;1-6;11 years). According to two dominant interpretations, the two tests either require different conceptual resources or vary only in their executive or linguistic load. In two experiments, involving 120 children aged 3-6 (Experiment 1) and 75 children aged 4-6 (Experiment 2), we tested two variants of the executive load hypothesis: The differential linguistic complexity of the two tests, and the dual-name problem of the intensionality task. The former was addressed by standardizing and minimizing the linguistic demands of both tasks (contrasted with the typical narrative intensionality task), and the latter by introducing the dual-name problem into the false belief task as well, so that it was present in both tasks. We found that (1) two structurally different intensionality tasks shared more variance with each other than with the structurally similar false belief task, and that (2) introducing a dual label problem into the false belief task did not reduce the developmental gap. Our results speak against interpreting the difference between the time children pass the two tests entirely in terms of performative issues, and support the conceptual enrichment hypothesis. We discuss the theoretical relevance of these results, suggesting that they are best explained by fine-grained increments within the concept of belief, rather than a radical conceptual change. We conclude that understanding opacity of minds-which emerges between age 5 and 6-is an important step toward a more advanced form of ToM.

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Children's Interpretation of Messages from a Speaker with a False Belief

Cited by 22 publications

References 22 publications

Overly Literal Interpretations of Speech in Autism: Understanding That Messages Arise from Minds

Overly Literal Interpretations of Speech in Autism: Understanding That Messages Arise from Minds

Cross-Cultural Variations in Naïve Psychology among 2-year-olds: A Comparison of Children in the United Kingdom and Singapore

The Development of Understanding Opacity in Preschoolers: A Transition From a Coarse- to Fine-Grained Understanding of Beliefs

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