Understanding children's and adults' limitations in mental state reasoning

Birch, Susan; Bloom, Paul

doi:10.1016/j.tics.2004.04.011

Cited by 221 publications

(158 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…It is not the overvaluing of private knowledge but the undifferentiated experience of shared knowledge that hinders perspective taking. Many diverse observations show this (Birch & Bloom, 2003;Fischhoff, 1975;Kelley & Jacoby, 1996;Keysar et al, 2003;Taylor et al, 1994). We assume that everyone has the same knowledge that we do, because most of our beliefs about the world were someone else's before we made them our own.…”

Section: [Page 922 ]mentioning

confidence: 93%

“…So, young children report that other children will know facts that they themselves have just learned (Taylor et al, 1994). It seems clear and unsurprising that three-year-olds are more likely than older children to assume this (Birch & Bloom, 2003). The curse of knowledge bias phenomenon accounts for the so-called 'egocentrism' of young children.…”

Section: [Page 922 ]mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Playing with reality: IV. A theory of external reality rooted in intersubjectivity

Fonagy

Target²

2007

International Journal of Psychoanalysis

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This paper explores the interpersonal aspects of the early development of an experience of external reality and the roots of this experience in primary intersubjectivity. We suggest some implications this has for psychoanalytic work with the patient's experience of external reality. We argue that the external world is not an independently existing 'given', for the infant to discover, as is sometimes implicitly assumed. Infants acquire knowledge about the world not just through their own explorations of it but by using other minds as teachers. The experience of external reality is invariably shaped through subjectivities. We argue that at first the infant assumes that his knowledge is knowledge held by all, that what he knows is known by others and what is known by others is accessible to him. Only slowly does the uniqueness of his own perspective differentiate so that a sense of mental self can develop. In clinical work we frequently observe the undoing of this process of differentiation, and understanding the underlying mechanisms can be helpful in managing the transference and countertransference consequences when the process has been derailed.

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Section: [Page 922 ]mentioning

confidence: 93%

Section: [Page 922 ]mentioning

confidence: 99%

Playing with reality: IV. A theory of external reality rooted in intersubjectivity

Fonagy

Target²

2007

International Journal of Psychoanalysis

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“…One possibility is that children, particularly those with ASD, suffered from egocentric interference (e.g., Birch & Bloom, 2004;…”

Section: Audience Design In Children 28mentioning

confidence: 99%

Development of audience design in children with and without ASD.

Fukumura¹

2016

Developmental Psychology

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We examined two hypotheses concerning the development of audience design by contrasting children with and without Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) in referential communication. The twostage hypothesis predicts that the ability to use contrastive size adjectives for ambiguity avoidance develops separately from and faster than the ability to avoid perspective-inappropriate descriptions for their addressee. The single-stage hypothesis assumes that both abilities reflect speakers' perspective-taking, and they should develop in tandem with each other. Experiment 1 found that 6-to-10 year olds with and without ASD produced disambiguating size adjectives (" small door") equally often when the size-contrasting competitor (large door) was in the visual context shared with their addressee. When the competitor was hidden from their addressee, that is, it was part of children's privileged context, children with ASD produced more perspective-inappropriate size adjectives than those without ASD, providing support for the two-stage model. Experiment 2 showed a similar pattern of results with 11-to-16-year-old adolescents. Compared to adults, 6-10-year-olds without ASD produced more perspective-inappropriate size adjectives in the privileged context, while producing fewer disambiguating size adjectives in the shared context, demonstrating more "egocentric" behaviours than adults. Importantly, whereas 11-16-year-olds without ASD produced disambiguating adjectives nearly as often as adults in the shared context, they produced perspectiveinappropriate adjectives more than adults in the privileged context. This indicated that even in non-ASD, the ability to avoid perspective-inappropriate descriptions develops more slowly than the ability to avoid ambiguous descriptions, delaying the onset of adult-like audience design, consistent with the two-stage hypothesis.

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“…Birch & Bloom [16] suggest that what changes over the course of the third year is the ability to overcome the bias to report what is truly the case, or to overcome the 'curse of knowledge'. In order to respond correctly about where Sally will look for her marble, children have to repress their representation about where the marble actually is (the 'pull of the real').…”

Section: What Determines Success or Failure? Case Studies From Develomentioning

confidence: 99%

Chimpanzee ‘folk physics’: bringing failures into focus

Seed

Seddon

Greene

et al. 2012

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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Differences between individuals are the raw material from which theories of the evolution and ontogeny of cognition are built. For example, when 4-year-old children pass a test requiring them to communicate the content of another's falsely held belief, while 3-year-olds fail, we know that something must change over the course of the third year of life. In the search for what develops or evolves, the typical route is to probe the extents and limits of successful individuals' ability. Another is to focus on those that failed, and find out what difference or lack prevented them from passing the task. Recent research in developmental psychology has harnessed individual differences to illuminate the cognitive mechanisms that emerge to enable success. We apply this approach to explaining some of the failures made by chimpanzees when using tools to solve problems. Twelve of 16 chimpanzees failed to discriminate between a complete and a broken tool when, after being set down, the ends of the broken one were aligned in front of them. There was a correlation between performance on this aligned task and another in which after being set down, the centre of both tools was covered, suggesting that the limiting factor was not the representation of connection, but memory or attention. Some chimpanzees that passed the aligned task passed a task in which the location of the broken tool was never visible but had to be inferred.

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Understanding children's and adults' limitations in mental state reasoning

Cited by 221 publications

References 42 publications

Playing with reality: IV. A theory of external reality rooted in intersubjectivity

Playing with reality: IV. A theory of external reality rooted in intersubjectivity

Development of audience design in children with and without ASD.

Chimpanzee ‘folk physics’: bringing failures into focus

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