Young children's psychological explanations and their relationship to perception‐ and intention‐understanding

Abstract

The present study examined two key aspects of young children's ability to explain human behaviour in a mentalistic way. First, we explored desires that are of a level of difficulty comparable with that of false beliefs. For this purpose, the so-called 'alternative desires' were created. Second, we examined how children's psychological explanations are related to their understanding of perception and intention. A perception-understanding task, an intention-understanding task and a psychological-explanation task were administered to 80 three-year-olds. Results offer support for the thesis that the level of difficulty of belief and desire explanations is comparable. Moreover, children's psychological explanations are related to their understanding of perception and intention. The results lend support to the idea that mentalistic explanations are an explicit manifestation of children's level of theory of mind.

Theory of Mind and Executive Function in Preschoolers with Typical Development Versus Intellectually Able Preschoolers with Autism Spectrum Disorder

“…When asked to explain puppets' emotions, children with ASD gave fewer informative explanations than the children with typical development but, surprisingly, a similar number of psychological explanations. The ASD group's seemingly intact ability to provide psychological explanations for puppets' happy and sad emotions seems to contradict what is known concerning ToM in children with ASD because psychological explanations might be considered an explicit means by which children show their understanding of the social world (Colonnesi et al 2008). However, the emotion recognition deficit in cognitively able children with ASD may not become apparent until they are required to recognize complex emotions and mental states (Golan et al 2007;Harris 1989) or atypical emotions (Rieffe et al 2000).…”

“…Children as young as 3 years can furnish an explanation for a protagonist's actions; yet, at this age preschoolers tend to explain the protagonist's desire (''he wants an apple'') rather than the psychological reason underlying that desire (''he wants an apple because he is hungry'') (Colonnesi et al 2008). When explaining an affective ToM (false-belief) task, older typical children at school ages tend to supply mentalistic justifications that explain the protagonist's mental state, rather than situational justifications that provide informational facts to support their answer (Parker et al 2007).…”

“…In accordance with previous studies indicating significantly lower scores on ToM prediction tasks among intellectually able children with ASD than their typical counterparts (school ages : Peterson 2005;Slaughter et al 2007;preschool ages: Pellicano 2007), we hypothesized the same group differences for our participants' predictions as well as their explanations on false-belief tasks. In line with Colonnesi et al (2008), we examined the children's explanation types (psychological or informative) in the affective false-belief task. Hence, we compared intellectually able preschoolers with ASD versus preschoolers with typical development on two EF abilities (cognitive shifting and planning) and on two major ToM capabilities (explanation and prediction) using first-order false-belief tasks (an unexpected-location task and an affective false-belief task).…”

Children's Understanding of Second‐Order False Belief: Comparisons of Content and Method of Assessment

“…The present study adopts the approach to explanations developed by Colonnesi, Koops, and Terwogt (). With this approach, the demonstration of the mistaken action or belief is followed by an initial why question.…”

Precursors of a theory of mind: A longitudinal study

“…The study is part of a bigger project about the precursors of a theory of mind. Part of the present project has already examined the relationship between the pointing gesture and intention during infancy (Camaioni et al , 2004), the change from 12 to 15 months of age in children's understanding of others' intentional actions (Bellagamba, Camaioni, & Colonnesi, 2006), and the relationship between children's use of psychological explanations and their understanding of perception and intention at the age of 3 years (Colonnesi, Koops, & Meerum Terwogt, 2008). The abilities examined during infancy were the comprehension and production of the pointing gesture with imperative and declarative motives, and the understanding of intentional actions using the behavioural re‐enactment procedure of Meltzoff (1995).…”