A teacher‐centered exploration of the relevance of social factors to theory of mind development

Abstract

Many accounts of children's Theory of Mind (ToM) development favor a cognitive explanation, for example, in terms of mental representational improvements at or before 4 years. Here, we investigated whether social factors as rated by a child's teacher, are related to ToM development. We tested 82 children of 3-6 years on each of four ToM tasks, and their class teacher completed a social questionnaire about each child's playing behavior, sharing, talkativeness, confidence, aggressiveness and outgoingness. A measure of task memory and the child's gender were also recorded. Here, children generally passed ToM tasks after 5 years-old, but no one gender performed reliably better than the other. Teacher-rated confidence and playing behavior were correlated to ToM. But in a regression analysis, these were replaced by teacher-rated talkativeness; with age and memory given primacy in both sets of analyses. It is concluded that maturation and cognitive factors may well have primacy but social factors, facilitated during early primary education, must also be given a role in ToM development.

Children's Theory of Mind, Self‐Perceptions, and Peer Relations: A Longitudinal Study

“…That is, some children may be more sensitive to teachers' criticisms as compared with other children who do not have such a well‐developed ability (Hughes, ; Lecce et al, ). Although our study did not find that teacher ratings of fearful and anxious behaviour in 6 year olds influenced their ToM 2 years later, further research needs to explore the connections and dynamic interplay between ToM and teacher ratings of social behaviour, particularly anxious and fearful behaviours (Wright & Mahfoud, ).…”

“…Developmentally, middle childhood often involves the increasing complexity of the school environment that represents children's interactions with teachers, peers, and others (Harter, ; Stipek, Recchia, & McClintic, ). The social experiences during this time provide children with an opportunity to co‐create different selves through their interactions with their peers, parents, and teachers (Bruner, ; Spilt et al, ; Wright & Mahfoud, ). Given this complex social context of the school environment, and the possible influence of peers and teachers on children's self‐perceptions, children's ToM ability may also influence how they relate to their peers.…”

Language Can Obscure as Well as Facilitate Apparent-Theory of Mind Performance: Part 2—The Case of Dyslexia in Adulthood

“…In second-order ToM, the reasoner contemplates the differing subjective beliefs of two protagonists in addition to his/her own current belief about a situation (Perner, 1991 ; Slade and Ruffman, 2005 ). Such higher order ToM requires appreciation and coordination of a greater number of symbolic representations and hence they highlight the importance of memory (Abell et al, 2000 ; Kaland et al, 2005 ; McKinnon and Moscovitch, 2007 ; Wright and Mahfoud, 2014 ).…”

“…This disadvantage (or advantage) does not have to have occurred because of atypical (or typical) linguistic development. For example, Gundel and Johnson, 2013 found that typically-developing 3 year-olds observed in their home environment demonstrate spontaneous production of sentences encapsulating ToM, even though this age group tends to fail on more formal “tests” of ToM such as via false-belief (Wellman et al, 2001 ; Wright and Mahfoud, 2014 ). Along somewhat similar lines, a deaf sub-group of children having a linguistic advantage over a second sub-group (e.g., bilingual vs. monolingual or early bilingual signers vs. late bilingual signers) tends to as a consequence demonstrate higher ToM abilities on false-belief tasks (Meristo et al, 2007 ).…”