Perceptual Access Reasoning (PAR) in Developing a Representational Theory of Mind

Abstract

An important part of children's social and cognitive development is their understanding that people are psychological beings with internal, mental states including desire, intention, perception, and belief. A full understanding of people as psychological beings requires a representational theory of mind (ToM), which is an understanding that mental states can faithfully represent reality, or misrepresent reality. For the last 35 years, researchers have relied on false‐belief tasks as the gold standard to test children's understanding that beliefs can misrepresent reality. In false‐belief tasks, children are asked to reason about the behavior of agents who have false beliefs about situations. Although a large body of evidence indicates that most children pass false‐belief tasks by the end of the preschool years, the evidence we present in this monograph suggests that most children do not understand false beliefs or, surprisingly, even true beliefs until middle childhood. We argue that young children pass false‐belief tasks without understanding false beliefs by using perceptual access reasoning (PAR). With PAR, children understand that seeing leads to knowing in the moment, but not that knowing also arises from thinking or persists as memory and belief after the situation changes. By the same token, PAR leads children to fail true‐belief tasks. PAR theory can account for performance on other traditional tests of representational ToM and related tasks, and can account for the factors that have been found to correlate with or affect both true‐ and false‐belief performance. The theory provides a new laboratory measure which we label the belief understanding scale (BUS). This scale can distinguish between a child who is operating with PAR versus a child who is understanding beliefs. This scale provides a method needed to allow the study of the development of representational ToM. In this monograph, we report the outcome of the tests that we have conducted of predictions generated by PAR theory. The findings demonstrated signature PAR limitations in reasoning about the mind during the ages when children are hypothesized to be using PAR. In Chapter II, secondary analyses of the published true‐belief literature revealed that children failed several types of true‐belief tasks. Chapters III through IX describe new empirical data collected across multiple studies between 2003 and 2014 from 580 children aged 4–7 years, as well as from a small sample of 14 adults. Participants were recruited from the Phoenix, Arizona metropolitan area. All participants were native English‐speakers. Children were recruited from university‐sponsored and community preschools and daycare centers, and from hospital maternity wards. Adults were university students who participated to partially fulfill course requirements for research participation. Sociometric data were collected only in Chapter IX, and are fully reported there. ...

Why Do Children Who Solve False Belief Tasks Begin to Find True Belief Control Tasks Difficult? A Test of Pragmatic Performance Factors in Theory of Mind Tasks

“…One possibility is that they reflect a competence limitation in children's ToM. Contrary to what findings from FB tasks suggest, these findings may be taken as an indication that children do not really engage in metarepresentation until much later (Fabricius et al, 2010(Fabricius et al, , 2021Hedger and Fabricius, 2011).…”

“…The present findings from the TB task by themselves are not strictly incompatible with alternative accounts that interpret older children's failure in TB tasks as an indication of lacking ToM competence(Fabricius et al, 2021). According to such accounts, this pattern of results suggests that children do not use metarepresentational belief ascription until much later, but rather operate with a simple (so-called "perceptual access") heuristic.…”

Open dataset of theory of mind reasoning in early to middle childhood

“… Theory of mind (ToM) reasoning describes how we reason about the mental states (beliefs, desires, emotions) of others. Key questions about ToM reasoning remain open: there are ongoing debates about developmental milestones in ToM (e.g., false belief reasoning [ 2 , 3 ]) and about the cohesiveness of ToM as a construct [4] . To allow further investigations into these debates, and to improve transparency and reproducibility in ToM research, we generated a dataset of 321 3–12-year-old children who completed at least one of two versions of a ToM story booklet task.…”

Language, ambiguity, and executive functions in adolescents' theory of mind

“…However, children's difficulties with certain tasks, such as ascribing true beliefs, has led some researchers to suggest that a true representational ToM does not occur until middle childhood. Fabricius et al (2021), for example, theorize that younger children are able to pass the false belief task based on perceptual access reasoning and not by understanding false beliefs (but see also Schidelko et al, 2021, who argue that children's difficulty with true beliefs is due to pragmatic performance factors, not a lack of a representational theory of mind).…”