Social Cognition

Psych. 414

Prof. Jessica Sommerville

Outline

• Folk psychology in adults

• Developing understandings of mind during the preschool years

• Precursors to a theory of mind

• Understandings of mind in older children

Folk Psychology

• Common-sense understandings that people use in ordinary life

• Can be distinguished from a scientific understanding of mind:– Can be inaccurate– Can be incomplete

• Shares characteristics with folk understanding in other domains (McCloskey, 1983)

Folk Psychology

• Consists of commonly shared lay theories about the mind and its role in behavior

• Invokes “mentalistic” concepts such as belief, desire, knowledge, fear, pain, expectation, intention, understanding, dreaming, imagination, self-consciousness and so on to predict behavior (D’Andrade, 1987)

• Theory?: coherent set of beliefs about the mind

Folk Psychology

• Has aspects that are universal:– All cultures distinguish between the real and

imaginary

• Varies across cultures in terms of when and how folk psychology is deployed– Implicit theories of motivation (Morris & Peng, 1994)

– Implicit theories of intelligence (Dweck, Chiu & Hong, 1995)

Having a Theory of Mind

• “Theory of mind” = the ability to attribute mental states to self and others

• Entails understanding the mind as a representational system– The mind doesn’t simply reflect reality, it

constructs reality

Having a Theory of Mind

• What constitutes evidence for a theory of mind?– litmus test: Distinguishing between one’s own

true belief, and the awareness of someone else’s different (false) belief (Dennett, 1978b)

– Involves metarepresentation

False Belief (Wimmer & Perner, 1983)

• Asked whether children have a representational theory of mind– Looked at appreciation that a person may hold a

belief that is incorrect

• Gave children tasks in which they were told a story and then had to predict a character’s actions

Maxi puts the chocolate in the blue cupboard. Maxi goes out to play and his mother moves the chocolate to the green cupboard.

Where will Maxi look for the chocolate?

0

1020

30

4050

60

70

8090

100

4-year-olds 6-year-olds 8-year-olds

Percentage of children who correctly predicted the protagonist’s belief

Appearance-Reality (Flavell, Flavell & Green, 1983)

• A sophisticated understanding of the mind also entails appreciating that one can believe that an object has one identity, when it really has another.

• Showed objects with misleading appearances• Four and 5-year-olds, but not 3-year-olds, could

appreciate that the objects looked like one thing, but really were another thing

Representational Change (Gopnik & Astington, 1988)

• Do children appreciate that their beliefs can change over time as a function of experience?

• Showed children an object with deceptive contents and asked children to recount what they thought the object had initially contained

Representational Change (Gopnik & Astington, 1988)

• Four and 5-year-olds appreciated that their belief had changed– Acknowledged that they had first thought the

box contained Smarties, but now knew it contained pencils

• Three-year-olds updated their prior belief to match the current state of affairs– Insisted that they had known all along that there

were pencils in the box

•Children are developing a principled understanding of how the mind works and its role in behavior between 3 and 5.

•Conceptual change: Understand the mind as a representational system.

False Belief, Appearance-Reality and Representational Change Performance

00.5

11.522.5

33.54

4.55

3 4 5

FBARRC

Early theories of mind

• Two transitions before children acquire a representational theory of mind (Bartsch

&Wellman, 1995):– Desire psychology (2-year-olds)

• Mentalistic but non-representational understanding of internal desire for external objects

– Desire-belief psychology (3-year-olds)• Understand that beliefs exist, but not that they play a

role in behavior

Factors contributing to theory of mind development

• Executive function abilities– Performance on ToM tasks related to IC– Lack of IC in young children limits their ability to

engage in mental state reasoning

• Family size– Number of sibs related to ToM performance

• Language abilities and exposure– ToM performance related to vocabulary– ToM performance correlated with mother’s use of

mental state terms

Recent challenges

• Conceptual change between 3 and 5?• Older children and adults sometimes exhibit

difficulty on theory of mind type tasks– This week’s assignment

• Younger children sometimes succeed on simplified theory of mind tasks– Clements and Perner (1994): “I wonder where he is going

to look?”• 3-year-olds look to the correct location

– Southgate et al (2007): 2.5-year-olds visually anticipate correct location

Older Children’s Understanding of Mind

• Children’s understanding of mental activities:– Understanding of the stream of consciousness

(Flavell, Green & Flavell, 1993)

– Understanding of the selectiveness of attentional focus (Flavell, Green & Flavell, 1995)

– Understanding of the limited natural of mental controllability (Flavell, Green & Flavell, 1998)

Stream of Consciousness

“Mary is just sitting there waiting right now, isn’t she? How about her mind right now? Is she having some thoughts and ideas, or is her mind empty of thoughts and ideas?”

5% of 3-year-olds, 20% of 4-year-olds, 55% of 6- & 7-year-olds and 95% of adults attributed thoughts and ideas during waiting trials

Attentional focus

• Recognition that attention is limited and selective

• When do children recognize this?– Recognizing people in a group photograph; will

character attend just to people or to frame of picture as well?

– 6- and 8-year-olds say she is only to people in photos; 4-year-olds say she will attend to the frame as well

Mental uncontrollability

• We don’t always have control over what we think about – Try not to think about a pink elephant

• When do children understand this?– Trying not to think about a receiving a needle while

waiting to get one– 5- and 9-year-olds claim that protagonist can avoid

thinking about the needle– 13-year-olds recognize that the protagonist will

automatically think about getting the shot