Social Cognition II: Theory of Mind

What is a theory of mind?

Understanding your own mental states and behaviors, as well as those of other people;
Emotions, desires, knowledge states, intentions, beliefs
A theory about how the mind worksand about how people work

 DAndrade on goal directedness as a fundamental component of folk psychology:

Complex human actions are assumed to be voluntary unless something indicates otherwise. A voluntary action is one in which someone

Early abilities
Attending to eyes/face in very early life -> mind reading later on
Face to face interactions Joint attention

Proto-declarative pointing; You and I are paying attention to the same thing We can communicate/share this way

Early abilities cont.

Very young children are sensitive to intention
Meltzoffs work (1995)
18-month-old participants Behavioral re-enactment procedure with novel objects
Demonstration - target Demonstration - intention Control

 Participants in both target and intention conditions imitated the action (completed the fumbled action in the latter case) Control groups

BUT: sensitive to intention.or just the physics of the situation?

Human versus Mechanical Demonstrator 6x more likely to imitate in human condition

 Pretense

A theory about theory of mind development

1.5-year-olds+

Desire ToM
2 and 3-year-olds+

Belief ToM
4 and 5-year-olds+

 Fitting the world to the mind (mental state changes the world)
This block is a horse

Pretend play

What is needed:
A pretender A reality A mental representation that is different from reality

Assessing Desire Theory of Mind

Repacholi and Gopnik (1997)
14-month-olds and 18-month-olds Food preference procedure

 Experimenter knew in advance whether child preferred goldfish (most) or broccoli (some!)

14-month-olds chose according to their own desire; Emergence of understanding that desire is subjective

Assessing Belief ToM

Most sophisticated; strict ToM ; fitting the mind to the world Unlike desires, beliefs can represent or misrepresent reality ->
Hence, a lot of emphasis on the understanding of beliefs

Tasks that assess this form of ToM

1) Representational Change task:
Whats this?

 Test Questions

When I first showed this to you, before I opened it, what did you think was inside?
Whats really inside?

 Marked age difference in response

3-year-olds: report that they
5-year-olds: report that they

Most children are able to report the true contents of the container (i.e., pencils).

 2) Sally-Ann (or Maxi) task:

Again, same age-related changes in performance

3) Trickery/Deception
Mean Monkey task:
Look at all of the great stickersyou get to keep your favorite. Which one is your favorite? Mean monkey wants stickers too and if he finds out which one you want, he will always pick the one that you want. What will you tell him?

Learning to deceive others

Talwar & Lee (2008)
Lying =

To what extent can young children do this and what is the relation to other ToM abilities?

 3- to 8-year-old participants
Guessing game
Experimenter asks child to turn around Plays sounds from familiar toys (e.g., Buzz Lightyear, Godzilla, Elmo) Child told not to peek, and to guess the toy on a few trials.

 Child asked who they think the toy is and whether they peeked.

 Results:

Of those who lied about peeking, most gave the correct answer (i.e. Barney; ~72%)

 Leakage (would they be able to give a plausible explanation for their knowledge?)
Youngest children:

Older children:

Ability to maintain a lie was associated with strong performance on false belief tasks.

What accounts for improvement in performance with age?

Executive function
developed
Higher order self-regulatory processes not well
Control of attention Cannot inhibit tendency to respond inappropriately (e.g., according to final state of affairs)

Pre-frontal cortex tremendous maturation over the course of childhood

 Executive function skills predict theory of mind performance:

Bear/Dragon task

Whisper Task (shhh!) ; Gift wrapping task

Dimensional Change Card Sort

 Dimensional Change Card Sort:

 Additional evidence for executive function account:

In some cases, can perform better if told the story (rather than seeing demo);

However
Executive function is necessary, but not sufficient for theory of mind acquisition E.g., Chinese children have advanced executive functioning skills relative to American children, but

Importance of real-world interactions ToM continues to develop over the life course:

Does John know that Mary knows that hes angry with her?

Theory of personality
Instead of temporary mental states, examines understanding of more stable dispositions of others
Attributions (niceness, meanness, shyness)

 Commonly believed that young kids do not make personality attributions about others
Emerges at 9 years of age?

Not the case:

Children as young as 3 years of age make basic personality attributions about other people (Boseovski & Lee, 2006, 2008; Boseovski,
Shallwani, & Lee, 2009)

 Boseovski & Lee (2006)

3- to 6-year-olds given one or five pieces of behavioral information about a story character (low vs. high frequency)

Asked to make basic personality judgment What kind of person is [character]?

* *

* Low High

Proportion target consistent

0.9 0.8 0.7 0.6 0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1 0

Positive Valence

Negative

Kids judged people as nice irrespective of whether they received one or five pieces of evidence, but required five pieces of evidence to judge someone as mean

 Evidence of profound positivity bias in personality judgments (Boseovski, 2010)

Boseovski (2012) Trust in informant testimony to learn about a stranger 3- to 7-year-olds observe informants labeling behaviors that they can see, too
Mean or nice One informant is correct (reliable), other is incorrect (unreliable)

 Test phase:

Two test trials in which participants did not witness any behaviors themselves this time

Video still of a novel protagonist that they had never seen before
Viewed the same two informants label this protagonist as nice or mean.
Shes nice! Shes mean!

 Children show tendency to believe the informant who judges person as nice, irrespective of reliability

 Other examples:
Assume that skills generalize across domains

Assume that positive events will happen in future

Judge selves and friends as smarter than they are

 May be adaptive: Encourages persistence in face of failure Children who are positive have an easier time with peer relations