Belief it or not: How children construct a theory of mind

Abstract

In this article, I briefly review theories about the development of theory of mind, and then examine evidence for minimalism, the idea that infants initially understand only behaviors. To this end, I consider the need for a wide variety of species to predict the behaviors of other animals and that human infants are not unique in this regard. I also discuss evidence for infants' understanding of behaviors, including their good statistical learning skills and their rich exposure to patterns of behavior, which correlates with their acquisition of mental state vocabulary. Finally, I discuss evidence for how maternal mental state talk, as well as children's evolving language and understanding of self, contributes to learning that mental states underlie behaviors.

False belief understanding in deaf children: what are the difficulties?

“…The findings should be considered preliminary and in need of replication with larger samples to establish their generalizability to the broader population of children with CIs. Finally, looking time measures can offer valuable insights into cognitive processes, but their interpretation is a subject of controversy, as demonstrated by the different theoretical perspectives presented in the introduction ( Heyes, 2014 ; Wellman, 2014 ; Tomasello, 2018 ; Ruffman, 2023 ). For example, some authors argue that infants’ false belief tasks in looking time studies can be interpreted as their understanding of epistemic states such as knowledge/ignorance rather than false beliefs.…”

“…The origins and nature of the competence displayed by infants and children in NV-SR tasks have become the subject of a lively debate between viewpoints that deny or credit infants with a metarepresentational capacity. The associationist and constructivist perspectives, as explored by Heyes (2014) and Ruffman (2023) , posit that infants’ reactions in false-belief tasks could be driven by basic associative processes or behavioral rules. Conversely, the mentalistic perspective, linked to researchers such as Leslie (1987) , Carey and Spelke (1996) , Baron-Cohen (1998) , Carruthers (2011) , and Scott et al (2022) , generally implies that individuals instinctively and non-verbally comprehend and interpret others’ mental states.…”

“…Language development, including pragmatic, lexical, and grammar skills, has been found to be positively related to performance on these tasks ( Milligan et al, 2007 ). Additionally, a child’s conversational environment, particularly the use of mental state language by mothers in conversations with their child, has been linked to the child’s performance on VS -ER tasks ( Meins et al, 2002 ; Ruffman, 2023 ). This suggests that children’s performance on VS -ER tasks may be influenced by both their own language understanding and production as well as the conversational environment in which they grow up.…”