Introduction to Developmental Psychology
Children’s Understanding of Other’s Minds
Theory of Mind the capacity to attribute mental states (such as desires, beliefs,
knowledge) to others in order to predict or explain behaviour.
Mentalizing
Mindreading
Empathy
Social cognition
Perspective taking
Piaget on children’s social development
Pre-operational stage (2-7 years): conversations between children are egocentric
o Child does not attempt to understand the point of view of the hearer.
o Focuses on themselves rather than being able to see it from someone else’s
perspective
Contrasts with socialised speech
o Child attempts to understand/influence the hearer
o They start to ask about what other people want rather than just thinking
about what they want
“There is no social life between children of less than 7 or 8 years” (Piaget, 1959,
p.41)
Domain general view of development: inability to ‘decentre’.
Model of Mountains
o Have a doll and the child has to see whether they can identify the doll’s
perspective
They were more likely to be able to hide the teddy from the robber at a younger age
compared to having to identify the doll’s point of view
Meta-representation
Children have to imagine that people are able to imagine different things to them
He argued that being able to understand that other people have different beliefs and
desires to us is the hallmark of being able to understand other people’s minds
Daniel Dennett
o Looked at Punch and Judy shows
o Every time punch did something that Judy wasn’t aware of, they found that
all children laughed
The false-belief task
See a boy hide his teddy in a basket and he then leaves the room
His sister then comes and moves the teddy out of the basket and into a box
The boy then comes back in from playing and the child watching the scenario is
asked where they think the boy will look for the teddy
, The truth about false belief
Between 30 months and about age 5 children’s performance goes above chance
levels – they point correctly to the correct location
Why all the fuss about mindreading?
Children who are better at mindreading in early childhood are:
o More likely to be rated by parents/teachers as prosocial
o More likely to be rated as popular about peers
o More likely to be rated as socially competent at the end of primary school by
their teachers
Nativist accounts
Mindreading is innate, domain-specific skill
Children are hard-wired to track the mental states of others
Development occurs as a result of specialised modules (each capable of processing
different types of mental states) coming online as we mature.
You are not born able to reason about other people’s minds but you are born ready
to develop this skill
Evidence for nativist theories
Mindreading is universal: it occurs in all humans
Specialised mechanism with evidence for specific impairments
o Children with autism but not children with intellectual disability fail the false
belief test
Mindreading emerges in infancy
Can infants reason about false beliefs?
Baillargeon said that Piaget was completely wrong about object permanence
because the task he used was too hard
She argued that the false belief task was too difficult for children to really show how
good they were at mind reading thoughts and feelings
She created a Violation of Expectations task
VofE looked at how the children reacted when something unexpected occurred
Baillargeon found that the children looked longer at the unexpected events
compared to the ones that they expected
She argued that the children had an innate ability to recognise that people can have
different beliefs to reality
Challenges
o Children could use simple ‘behaviour rules’ rather than ToM, e.g., people look
for things where they last saw them
o Implicit knowledge ≠ explicit understanding
o Two systems for mindreading: early-emerging, inflexible system vs. late-
emerging, flexible system
Children’s Understanding of Other’s Minds
Theory of Mind the capacity to attribute mental states (such as desires, beliefs,
knowledge) to others in order to predict or explain behaviour.
Mentalizing
Mindreading
Empathy
Social cognition
Perspective taking
Piaget on children’s social development
Pre-operational stage (2-7 years): conversations between children are egocentric
o Child does not attempt to understand the point of view of the hearer.
o Focuses on themselves rather than being able to see it from someone else’s
perspective
Contrasts with socialised speech
o Child attempts to understand/influence the hearer
o They start to ask about what other people want rather than just thinking
about what they want
“There is no social life between children of less than 7 or 8 years” (Piaget, 1959,
p.41)
Domain general view of development: inability to ‘decentre’.
Model of Mountains
o Have a doll and the child has to see whether they can identify the doll’s
perspective
They were more likely to be able to hide the teddy from the robber at a younger age
compared to having to identify the doll’s point of view
Meta-representation
Children have to imagine that people are able to imagine different things to them
He argued that being able to understand that other people have different beliefs and
desires to us is the hallmark of being able to understand other people’s minds
Daniel Dennett
o Looked at Punch and Judy shows
o Every time punch did something that Judy wasn’t aware of, they found that
all children laughed
The false-belief task
See a boy hide his teddy in a basket and he then leaves the room
His sister then comes and moves the teddy out of the basket and into a box
The boy then comes back in from playing and the child watching the scenario is
asked where they think the boy will look for the teddy
, The truth about false belief
Between 30 months and about age 5 children’s performance goes above chance
levels – they point correctly to the correct location
Why all the fuss about mindreading?
Children who are better at mindreading in early childhood are:
o More likely to be rated by parents/teachers as prosocial
o More likely to be rated as popular about peers
o More likely to be rated as socially competent at the end of primary school by
their teachers
Nativist accounts
Mindreading is innate, domain-specific skill
Children are hard-wired to track the mental states of others
Development occurs as a result of specialised modules (each capable of processing
different types of mental states) coming online as we mature.
You are not born able to reason about other people’s minds but you are born ready
to develop this skill
Evidence for nativist theories
Mindreading is universal: it occurs in all humans
Specialised mechanism with evidence for specific impairments
o Children with autism but not children with intellectual disability fail the false
belief test
Mindreading emerges in infancy
Can infants reason about false beliefs?
Baillargeon said that Piaget was completely wrong about object permanence
because the task he used was too hard
She argued that the false belief task was too difficult for children to really show how
good they were at mind reading thoughts and feelings
She created a Violation of Expectations task
VofE looked at how the children reacted when something unexpected occurred
Baillargeon found that the children looked longer at the unexpected events
compared to the ones that they expected
She argued that the children had an innate ability to recognise that people can have
different beliefs to reality
Challenges
o Children could use simple ‘behaviour rules’ rather than ToM, e.g., people look
for things where they last saw them
o Implicit knowledge ≠ explicit understanding
o Two systems for mindreading: early-emerging, inflexible system vs. late-
emerging, flexible system
