Development of Folk Knowledge in Psychology

1. HUMAN DEVELOPMENT 1PSYCHOLOGY 3050:The Development of Folk Knowledge (Ch 6) Dr. Jamie Drover SN-3094, 864-8383 e-mail -- jrdrover@mun.ca Fall Semester, 2012

2. Theory Theories • We have innate theories that we modify during childhood. • A theory is tested and then revised when it no longer explains new data. • We have innate knowledge, or processing constraints in certain domains. • Neonativism

3. Theory Theories • They integrate innate knowledge with constructivism. • The cognitive processes that undergo gradual constructivist development are actually innate. • They require specific motor and/or sensory skills. • Object permanence • Very young infants can show this ability when tasks are modified.

4. Theory Theories • Gopnik and Meltzoff propose that children are born with sets of rules for operating on particular representations. • These rules are altered by experience. • Development is still constructive. • The child has a particular theory. • There is disorganization. • A new coherent theory emerges.

5. Developing a Theory of Mind • Recognizing different categories of mind, such as dreams, memories, beliefs, etc. • Includes the ability to understand that other people have beliefs, desires and intentions that are different from one's own. • A theory to understand, predict, and explain behavior.

6. Development of Theory of Mind • Adult theory of mind is based on belief-desire reasoning. • We explain and predict what people do based on what we understand their beliefs and desires to be. • Referring to wants, wishes, hopes, and goals, and to their ideas, opinions and knowledge.

7. Skills Underlying Theory of Mind • Viewing oneself and others as intentional agents. • Individuals who cause things to happen and whose behavior is designed to achieve some goal. • The ability to take the perspective of another person, i.e., understand the intentions of others.

8. Skills Underlying Theory of Mind • This knowledge develops over the first few years of life, beginning with shared attention. • A triadic interaction between two partners and a third object. • Appears at about 9 months. • At 12 months, they point to things that others aren’t aware of. • At 12 to 18 months, they use the gaze of others to achieve shared attention.

9. Skills Underlying Theory of Mind • There is early evidence that infants and toddlers view others as intentional agents. • More likely to copy the behavior of a model who is engaged in the action on purpose. • See Carpenter et al (1998) p 202. • See Meltzoff (1995) p 202.

10. The Development of Mind Reading • Researchers have developed several tasks to assess when and how children develop this latter aspect of theory of mind. • False-belief task: a child watches as a candy is hidden in a special location. • Another child is present when the candy is hidden. • The hidden candy is then relocated.

11. The Development of Mind Reading • Child is asked whether the other child will know the location of the candy. • 4-year-olds can solve the problem. 3-year-olds can not. • A variation of this is the Smarties task. • Suggests that children are unable to remember their original belief.

12. The Development of Mind Reading • Young children have difficulty with contradictory evidence. • Can’t deal with two representations of a single object simultaneously. • Similar to the dual-representation hypothesis. • Young children will fail in situations where they must consider two beliefs or representations for a single target.

13. The Development of Mind Reading • Gopnik and Astington assessed 3, 4, and 5 year-old’s abilities to solve tasks that require children to deal with contradictory evidence (See Fig 6-2 p 204). • Performance varied with age. • A domain-general mechanism underlies representational abilities.

14. The Development of Mind Reading • Young children lack executive function. • Cognitive abilities involved in planning, executing, and inhibiting actions. • In theory of mind tasks, children often have to inhibit a dominant response to pass the task. • See the mean monkey example (p. 205). • Note however, 3-year-olds can solve other tasks that require an understanding of other’s minds.

15. The Development of Mind Reading • See p. 206 (Clemens & Perner, 1994) • Implicitly, children were correct. • 3-year-olds have an implicit understanding of false belief that exceeds their verbal understanding. • In some studies, 18-month-olds show the beginnings of theory of mind. • See page 207 (Repacholi & Gopnik, 1997).

16. The Development of Mind Reading • Performance on false beliefs task are related to family size. • Children from larger families perform better. • This only helps if one has older siblings. • Important for children with low language skills.

17. Deception • When children play tricks on others, they seem to be aware of what the other person does and does not know. • 2- and 3-year-olds are often capable of deception. • See p. 210 (Chandler et al. 1989) • 2.5 to 4 year-old children showed several types of deception. • Withhold evidence, destroy evidence, lying, producing false evidence.

18. Hiding Containers Sponge Footprints Main Container

19. Deception • Even 2.5-3 year-olds will engage in deceptive practices to instill false beliefs in others. • See page 255 (Hala & Chandler, 1996; Sullivan & Winner, 1993).

20. Do 3-Year-Olds Have a Theory of Mind • Currently there is debate whether 3-year-olds possess theory of mind. • Most researchers agree that 3-year-olds appear to have a limited knowledge of other’s minds. • Some argue that 3-year-olds have competence, but the nature of the task prevents them from showing it. • Others argue that there is real conceptual change during the preschool years.

21. Do 3-Year-Olds Have a Theory of Mind • Wellman et al. (2001) conducted a meta-analysis of 178 studies. • They found age effects which support the conceptual change position.

22. Theory of Mind, Evolved Modules, and Autism • Some theorists believe that Theory of Mind evolved during the course of human evolution and is the basis of social intelligence. • It’s assumed that we have domain-specific modules to handle theory of mind. • According to Baron-Cohen (1995), there are four interacting modules involved in mindreading that develop in the first 4 years.

23. Theory of Mind, Evolved Modules, and Autism • Intentionality Detector (ID): interprets moving objects as having some intention • Eye Direction Detector (EDD): Detects the presence of eyes. Determines when another organism is looking at them. Develops between birth and 9 months. • Shared Attention Mechanism: Involves three-way interactions. Develops from 9-18 months.

24. Theory of Mind, Evolved Modules, and Autism • Theory of Mind Module: Understanding that others have different beliefs, desires, and intentions (develops between 18 and 48 months).

25. The Empathizing System • Baron-Cohen proposed The Emotion Detector (TED) which develops by 9 months of age. • It can represent affective or emotional states between two people. • Within 6 months of life, infants can pick up on the emotions of others. • At 9 months, the info derived from TED can be converted into a triadic representation of the SAM.

26. The Empathizing System • The Empathizing SyStem (TESS) is online at 14 months of age. • It permits an empathic reaction to another person’s emotions, and assumes there is an associated drive to help others.

27. Mindblindness • The inability to read minds. • Advanced forms of mindreading and empathizing are absent or delayed in children with autism. • Autistic children fail false-belief and theory of mind tasks but can pass nonsocial tasks. • They perform well on tasks requiring the ID and EDD modules, but not those requiring SAM or Theory of mind.

28. Mindblindness • Children with Down Syndrome perform well on theory-of-mind tasks, but perform poorly on tasks of intelligence.

29. The Development of Spatial Cognition • Processing information with respect to their spatial relations. • Coding information about the environment. • Knowing where something is in relation to you, or in relation to other objects and locations. • See Table 6.4

30. Spatial Orientation • How people understand the placement of objects in space with themselves as a reference point. • Eg. Distinguishing geographic directions in an unfamiliar locale, drawing your way from point A to B on a map. • Relatively well-developed in preschool. • See Huttenlocher & Vasilyeva (2003) on p 227 • See Newcombe et al. (1999) on p 227

31. Spatial Orientation • Older children are even more advanced…can form cognitive maps. • i.e., 5, 7, and 10-year-olds could re-create the layout of a large model town based on memory (Herman & Siegel, 1978). • Got better with age. • They get better at using real maps over the school years. • Adultlike by age 10

32. Spatial Orientation • Uttal et al. (2001) showed 3, 4, and 5-year-olds yellow carpet with 27 cups on it. • They had to find stickers under some cups using a map. • The maps included lines for half the kids, no lines for the other half. • Children got better with age. • Lines improved the performance for 5-year-olds.

33. Spatial Orientation • Maps are a tool of intellectual adaptation that can eventually be internalized. • There is a reciprocal relationship between maps and spatial cognition. • Uttal & Wellman (1989) had 4 to 7-year-old children learn which of 6 animals went into each of 6 rooms in a life-sized playhouse. • Children learned the locations based on a map or on flash cards.

34. Spatial Orientation • The children who learned with the map performed better on a “walk-through.” • The experience with the map allowed them to more easily see spatial relationships among elements.

35. Spatial Visualization • Involves visual/mental operations. • Often assessed using mental rotation. • A stimulus must be rotated to see if it matches another. • Even 4 and 5-year-olds can do this. • Adults can have problems with complex stimuli.

36. Spatial Visualization

37. Spatial Visualization • Piaget and Inhelder (1967) tested spatial visualization using the water-level problem. • Most children can do this by age 7.

38. Object and Location Memory • Remembering objects and their positions. • Often tested using card games. • Young children (5 yrs) perform almost as well as adults early in these games. • Strategies are less important.

39. Sex Differences in Spatial Cognition • There are sex differences in spatial cognition that may have been selected for through the course of evolution. • Males needed to develop spatial abilities in order to navigate (Geary, 2007). • Sex differences in map reading and mental rotation have been found in preschool years. • Mental rotation differences may exist in infancy.

40. Sex Differences in Spatial Cognition • According to meta-analyses, the magnitude of sex differences is very small. • Only 1 to 5% of the difference is due to gender. • Mental rotation is especially prominent. • Females show better performance in object and location memory. • May be due to evolution…role as gatherers. • Must be able to perceive small stimulus differences.

41. Sex Differences in Spatial Cognition • Differential experiences may also play a role. • Newcombe et al. (1983) asked college students to classify activities as masculine, feminine, or neutral (see Table 6-5). • Tasks with high spatial content were considered masculine. • They found a gender difference on a test with strong spatial components.

42. Sex Differences in Spatial Cognition • The more spatial activities one engages in, the greater one’s spatial ability.

43. Object-Oriented Play and Tool Use • Object-Oriented Play: manipulation of objects (banging or throwing), including the use of objects to build something. • Difficult to distinguish from exploration. • Often involves making noise.

44. Object-Oriented Play and Tool Use • Play eventually becomes more sophisticated. • Building things --- boys more likely. • May be a biological origin.

45. Object-Oriented Play and Tool Use • Preschoolers spend 10 to 15% of their time engaged in object play. • This object play allows children to learn how objects can be used as tools. • This is something very few species can do.

46. Learning to use Tools • Common in problem solving: forks, pens, hammers, etc. • Non-humans also use tools to solve problems

47. Learning to use Tools • May originate from infants’ manipulation of their physical world (Lockman, 2000) • It’s a gradual process of discovery that arises from infants’ and children’s interaction with objects in the real world to achieve a perceptual outcome.

48. The Development of Tool Use in Young Children • Piaget speculated that infants could use tools by their first birthday. • 9- to 12 mo-old infants learn to solve lure-retrieval problems • E.g., can use a stick to reach toy outside playpen • Chen and Siegler (2000): systematic study of tool use in toddlers: 18- to 30-mo • Child seated across from out-of-reach toys • Several tools available • Only one will retrieve the toy • Three trials – encouraged to get toy • Hint and modeling conditions given

49. The Development of Tool Use in Young Children

50. The Development of Tool Use in Young Children