Children's Understanding of Behavioral Consequences of Epistemic States: A Comparison of Knowledge, Ignorance, and False Belief

Abstract

The author addressed the issue of the simultaneity of false belief and knowledge understanding by investigating children's ability to predict the behavioral consequences of knowledge, ignorance, and false belief. The second aim of the study was to explore the role of counterfactuals in knowledge understanding. Ninety-nine (99) children, age 3-7 years old, completed the unexpected transfer task and a newly designed task in which a protagonist experienced 1 of the following 4 situations: knowing a fact, not knowing a fact, knowing a procedure, and not knowing a procedure. The results showed that factual ignorance was as difficult as false belief for the children, whereas the other conditions were all easier than false belief, suggesting that the well-known lag between ignorance and false belief may be partly methodologically based. The results provide support for a common underlying conceptual system for both knowing and believing, and evidence of the role of counterfactual reasoning in the development of epistemic state understanding. Methodological variations of the new task are proposed for future research.

3-5 Yaş Grubu Çocuklara Yönelik Zihin Kuramı Testi: Geçerlik Güvenirlik Çalışması

“…(1999) Çocuklara Zihin Okumayı Öğretme isimli kitabından ve Wellman ve Liu'nin (2004) iki-altı yaş arası çocuklar için geliştirdikleri Zihin Kuramı Ölçeğinden yararlanılmıştır. Dördüncü alt test olan Bilgi Sahipliği alt testinde ilk düzeyinde yer alan maddelerin hazırlanmasında Wellman ve Liu (2004) ve Deneault (2015) tarafından geliştirilen işlemlerden faydalanılmıştır. Beşinci alt test olan İnançlar alt testinde yer alan maddeler alanyazında sıklıkla kullanılan zihin kuramı işlemleridir.…”