意外地点任务中不同测试问题及意图理解与执行功能的关系

旨在讨论意外地点任务中“知否问题”与“预测问题”可能存在的差异及两者与执行功能任务的关系,并初步探讨意图理解与执行功能间的关系。用意外地点任务、膝跳反射任务和两个执行功能的任务（DCCS和手部游戏）对59名3~5岁的儿童施测。结果显示：（1）儿童在意外地点任务的“知否问题”上的表现显著好于“预测问题”,儿童对“知否问题”和“预测问题”的回答可能反映了心理理论发展的不同阶段。（2）膝跳反射任务,DCCS任务与“知否问题”三者间有显著的相关,且其高相关在排除年龄及语言能力的影响后仍保持显著。“双表征区分结构”可能是三者间具有共同的成分。     

Age-related changes in children's use of external representations.

This study explored children's use of external representations. Experiment 1 focused on representations of self: Self-recognition was assessed by a mark test as a function of age (3 vs. 4 years), delay (5 s vs. 3 min), and media (photographs vs. drawings). Four-year-olds outperformed 3-year-olds; children performed better with photographs than drawings; and there was no effect of delay. In Experiment 2, 3- and 4-year-olds used a delayed video image to locate a sticker on themselves (self task) or a stuffed animal (other task). The 2 tasks were positively correlated with age and vocabulary partialed out. Experiment 3 used a search task to assess whether children have particular difficulty using external representations that conflict with their expectations: 3- and 4-year-olds were informed of an object's location verbally or through video: on half of the trials, this information conflicted with children's initial belief. Three-year-olds performed worse than 4-year-olds on conflict trials, indicating that assessments of self and other understanding may reflect children's ability to reason about conflicting external representations.     

Children's command of quantification

In this article we present data from two sets of experiments designed to investigate how children and adult speakers of English and Kannada (Dravidian) interpret scopally ambiguous sentences containing numerally quantified noun phrases and negation (e.g. Donald didn't find two guys). We use this kind of sentence as a way to find evidence in children's linguistic representations for the hierarchical structure and the abstract relations defined over these structures (in particular, the relation of c-command) that linguists take to be at the core of grammatical knowledge. Specifically, we uncover the existence of systematic differences in the way that children and adult speakers resolve these ambiguities, independent of the language they speak. That is, while adults can easily access either scope interpretation, 4-year-old children display a strong preference for the scopal interpretation of the quantified elements which corresponds to their surface syntactic position. Crucially, however, we show that children's interpretations are constrained by the surface hierarchical relations (i.e. the c-command relations) between these elements and not by their linear order. Children's non-adult interpretations are therefore informative about the nature of the syntactic representations they entertain and the rules they use to determine the meaning of a sentence from its structure.     

Children's understanding of the knowledge prerequisites of drawing and pretending

Many young children will claim that someone is pretending to be something even when the person does not know what that something is. To examine whether children's failure to take knowledge prerequisites into account is part of a more fundamental problem in recognizing how mental representations constrain external ones, the authors asked children whether an artist who did not know what something was, yet whose drawing bore resemblance to it, was drawing it. The same questions were asked regarding pretending. Children performed similarly on pretending and drawing questions, and performance on both questions improved when the protagonists' point of view was emphasized. Performance for drawing improved somewhat when alternative goals were stated. Further, cross-sectional data indicated that understanding how knowledge relates to producing external representations increases gradually from age 4 to age 8, suggesting that experiential factors may be crucial to this understanding.     

Interparental conflict and children's school adjustment: the explanatory role of children's internal representations of interparental and parent-child relationships

This study examined how children's insecure internal representations of interparental and parent-child relationships served as explanatory mechanisms in multiple pathways linking interparental conflict and parent emotional unavailability with the emotional and classroom engagement difficulties the children had in their adjustment to school. With their parents, 229 kindergarten children (127 girls and 102 boys, mean age = 6.0 years, SD = .50, at Wave 1) participated in this multimethod, 3-year longitudinal investigation. Findings revealed that children's insecure representations of the interparental relationship were a significant intervening mechanism in associations between observational ratings of interparental conflict and child and teacher reports on children's emotional and classroom difficulties in school over a 2-year period. Moreover, increased parental emotional unavailability accompanying high levels of interparental conflict was associated with children's insecure representations of the parent-child relationship and children's difficulties in classroom engagement at school entry. The findings highlight the importance of understanding the intrinsic processes that contribute to difficulties with stage-salient tasks for children who are experiencing interparental discord.     

Children's understanding of natural language hierarchies

Three experiments examined young children's ability to evaluate the relationship between concepts as one of inclusion. In Experiment 1, the same group of 4-to 7-year-old children were given three tasks: one in which they made judgments about whether “all” or “some” members of a category were included in another category, and two tasks in which they made inferences based on knowledge of inclusion relations. The majority of children succeeded on at least one of the tasks, thereby implying that they could evaluate inclusion relations. Two further experiments provided more evidence for this hypothesis: Experiment 2 confirmed that nursery children could answer quantitative questions about conceptual interrelationts; Experiment 3 demonstrated that nursery schoolers could solve certain inference problems involving the construction and evaluation of hierarchies.     

Mothers’ Empathic Understanding of their Toddlers: Associations with Maternal Depression and Sensitivity

Mothers’ empathic understanding of their children’s motives, thoughts, and feelings is thought to guide parenting behaviors and shape the mother-child relationship. However, little is known about the relation between empathic understanding and parenting behaviors during developmental shifts that may be emotionally challenging for mothers, such as the transition from infancy to the toddler years, or how it may relate to maternal depressive symptoms. We assessed relations between maternal empathic understanding, depression, and sensitivity. We developed a coding system, the Empathic Understanding Assessment (EUA), to measure this construct in the mothers of 30-month old children. One hundred twenty eight mother-child pairs participated in a series of lab-based tasks designed to be challenging for the children. Mothers then watched these videotaped interactions and responded to questions regarding their children’s experiences. Interview content was coded using the EUA. Results indicated that mothers higher in empathic understanding and more intensely emotional were rated as more sensitive. Maternal depression was negatively related to empathic understanding. The importance of considering the role of maternal empathic understanding in parenting behavior is discussed, as are potential implications for child outcomes.     

Children's profiles of addition and subtraction understanding

The current research explored children's ability to recognize and explain different concepts both with and without reference to physical objects so as to provide insight into the development of children's addition and subtraction understanding. In Study 1, 72 7- to 9-year-olds judged and explained a puppet's activities involving three conceptual relations: (a) a+b=c, b+a=c; (b) a-b=c, a-c=b; and (c) a+b=c, c-b=a. In Study 2, the self-reports and problem-solving accuracy of 60 5- to 7-year-olds were recorded for three-term inverse problems (i.e., a+b-b=?), pairs of complementary addition and subtraction problems (i.e., a+b=c, c-b=?), and unrelated addition and subtraction problems (e.g., 3-2). Both studies highlighted individual differences in the concepts that children understand and the role of concrete referents in their understanding. These differences were related to using efficient procedures to solve unrelated addition and subtraction problems in Study 2. The results suggest that a key advance in children's conceptual understanding is incorporating subtractive relations into their mental representations of how parts are added to form a whole.     

Evidentiality in language and cognition

What is the relation between language and thought? Specifically, how do linguistic and conceptual representations make contact during language learning? This paper addresses these questions by investigating the acquisition of evidentiality (the linguistic encoding of information source) and its relation to children's evidential reasoning. Previous studies have hypothesized that the acquisition of evidentiality is complicated by the subtleness and abstractness of the underlying concepts; other studies have suggested that learning a language which systematically (e.g. grammatically) marks evidential categories might serve as a pacesetter for early reasoning about sources of information. We conducted experimental studies with children learning Korean (a language with evidential morphology) and English (a language without grammaticalized evidentiality) in order to test these hypotheses. Our experiments compared 3- and 4-year-old Korean children's knowledge of the semantics and discourse functions of evidential morphemes to their (non-linguistic) ability to recognize and report different types of evidential sources. They also compared Korean children's source monitoring abilities to the source monitoring abilities of English-speaking children of the same age. We found that Korean-speaking children have considerable success in producing evidential morphology but their comprehension of such morphology is very fragile. Nevertheless, young Korean speakers are able to reason successfully about sources of information in non-linguistic tasks; furthermore, their performance in these tasks is similar to that of English-speaking peers. These results support the conclusion that the acquisition of evidential expressions poses considerable problems for learners; however, these problems are not (necessarily) conceptual in nature. Our data also suggest that, contrary to relativistic expectations, children's ability to reason about sources of information proceeds along similar lines in diverse language-learning populations and is not tied to the acquisition of the linguistic markers of evidentiality in the exposure language. We discuss implications of our findings for the relationship between linguistic and conceptual representations during development.     

Do children really confuse appearance and reality?

Our understanding of many mental, social and physical phenomena hinges on a general understanding that appearances can differ from reality. Yet young children sometimes seem unable to understand appearance-reality dissociations. In a standard test, children are shown a deceptive object and asked what it really is and what it looks like. Many preschool children give the same answer to both questions. This error has been attributed to children's inflexible conceptual representations or inflexibility in representing their own changing beliefs. However, evidence fails to support either hypothesis: new tests show that young children generally understand appearance-reality discrepancies as well as fantasy-reality distinctions. These tests instead implicate children's failure to understand the unfamiliar discourse format of the standard test. This misunderstanding might reveal a subtler difficulty in making logical inferences about questions.     

Does the autistic child have a metarepresentational deficit?

This study examines the claim that autistic children lack a “theory of mind” because of an inability to metarepresent. We argue that if autistic children have a “metarepresentational” deficit in Leslie's (1987, 1988) sense of the term, then they should have difficulty not only with mental representations such as false beliefs, but also with external representations such as photographs. Autistic children's understanding of photographic representations was tested using Zaitchik's (1990) task. This task is modelled on the false belief task (Baron-Cohen, Leslie, & Frith, 1985: Wimmer & Perner, 1983) but involves “false” photographs where a photographic representation does not conform with the current state of the real world. Like Zaitchik (1990) we found that normal 3 and 4-year-olds found this task as difficult as the false belief task. In sharp contrast, however, the autistic children in our study passed the photograph task but failed the false belief task. As both tasks require the ability to decouple, this evidence challenges the view that autistic children lack “metarepresentational” ability in Leslie's sense. However, the results leave open the question of whether autistic children have a metarepresentational ability in the different sense of the term intended by Pylyshyn (1978), that is, representing the relationship between a representation and what it represents.     

Children's internal representations,empathy, and fantasy play: a validity study of the SCORS-Q

The authors investigated relationships among internal representations, empathy, and affective and cognitive processes in fantasy play to test the validity of the Social Cognition and Object Relations Scale Q-Sort (SCORS-Q; D. Westen, 1995) with children. Eighty-six 8-10-year-olds were administered 8 Thematic Apperception Test cards, a standardized play task, and a self-report empathy measure. Teachers rated children's empathy and helpfulness. As predicted, internal representations were related to empathy, helpfulness, and quality of fantasy play. Developmental differences on the SCORS-Q were consistent with object relations theory and with results from the original SCORS. The findings support the value of internal representations as a means of understanding children's interpersonal functioning and contribute to the validity of the SCORS-Q for use with children.     

Conceptual development and conversational understanding

Children's understanding of the implications of conversation can influence their responses on tasks designed to measure conceptual development. These responses are in keeping with developmental changes in the ability to recognize and resolve ambiguity in communicative contexts, as shown, for example, in children's ability to compute "scalar implicatures". Examining steps children take to overcome difficulties in processing the relevant features of tasks and in correctly interpreting task instructions promise to illuminate mechanisms of conceptual development. We review recent research in this area, focussing on early knowledge of the appearance-reality distinction and knowledge of cosmological concepts.     

3~5岁儿童理解和使用空间表征的特点

以96名3~5儿童为被试,采用自编的儿童空间表征实验任务,在语言表征、模型表征和图画表征三种空间表征形式上,考察了儿童理解和使用空间表征的发展特点。结果表明:(1)总体上,3~5岁儿童理解空间表征的发展水平均显著高于使用空间表征的发展水平。(2)3~5岁儿童理解和使用空间表征的发展表现出显著的年龄效应。(3)从不同的空间表证形式来看,3岁儿童理解语言表征的能力与理解模型表征的能力之间差异显著,4岁儿童使用语言表征的能力与使用模型表征的能力之间的差异、使用语言表征的能力与使用图画表征的能力之间的差异、以及使用模型表征的能力与使用图画表征的能力之间的差异都显著,其余形式的空间表征理解之间的差异或空间表征使用之间的差异在各年龄段中均不显著。     

聋童与正常儿童对假装表征、模仿性假装和欺骗性假装的认识

本研究认为,对假装的认识包含理解假装表征、模仿性假装和欺骗性假装。选取了86名3-5岁的学前儿童和122名3-12岁的聋童,考察他们对假装上述内容的认知情况及差异。结果表明：（1）当假装任务中涉及的事物特征不符合儿童经验时,9岁前的聋童和正常学前儿童难以理解假装表征和模仿性假装。反之若符合儿童的经验,大部分3岁正常儿童及7岁聋童就能正确理解上述内容;（2）5岁正常儿童和7岁聋童已能正确理解欺骗性假装,这比他们在同样情境下理解假装的表征和模仿性假装的年龄要迟。（3）聋童理解假装问题要比正常儿童滞后2-4年,但他们正确理解这些问题的年龄起点及达到的程度与正常儿童可能是一致的,而且发展的趋势也是相似的。（4）手语聋童理解假装问题的成绩好于口语聋童,那些父母会手语或父母是聋人的聋童的成绩好于其他聋童。本研究的结论是：低龄正常儿童和聋童还难以真正理解假装表征;聋童对假装的认识比正常儿童滞后2-4年,但发展趋势相似;聋童自身的手语水平及其父母的手语水平是影响他们理解假装的主要因素。     

Children's understanding of promising, lying, and false belief

Understanding promising and lying requires an understanding of intention and the ability to interpret mental states. The author examined (a) the extent to which 4- to 6-year-olds focus on the sincerity of the speaker's intention when the 4-to 6-year-olds make judgments about promises and lies and (b) whether false-belief reasoning skills are related to understanding promising and lying. Participants watched videotaped stories and made promise and lie judgments from their own perspective and from the listener-character's perspective. Children also completed false-belief reasoning tasks. Older children made more correct promise judgments from both perspectives. All children made correct lie judgments from the listener's perspective. The author found that Ist-order false-belief reasoning was related to making judgments from the participant's perspective; 2nd-order false-belief reasoning was related to making judgments from the listener-character's perspective. Results suggest that children's understanding of promising and lying moves from a focus on outcome toward a focus on the belief that each utterance is designed to create.     

Memory and suggestibility in maltreated children: age,stress arousal,dissociation, and psychopathology

The present study was designed to assess children's memory and suggestibility in the context of ongoing child maltreatment investigations. One hundred eighty-nine 3-17-year-olds involved in evaluations of alleged maltreatment were interviewed with specific and misleading questions about an anogenital examination and clinical assessment. For the anogenital examination, children's stress arousal was indexed both behaviorally and physiologically. For all children, individual-difference data were gathered on intellectual and short-term memory abilities, general psychopathology, and dissociative tendencies. Interviewers' ratings were available for a subset of children concerning the amount of detail provided in abuse disclosures. Results indicated that general psychopathology, short-term memory, and intellectual ability predicted facets of children's memory performance. Older compared to younger children evinced fewer memory errors and greater suggestibility resistance. Age was also significantly related to the amount of detail in children's abuse disclosures. Neither dissociation nor stress arousal significantly predicted children's memory. Implications for understanding maltreated children's eyewitness memory are discussed.     

Representations in Distributed Cognitive Tasks

In this article we propose a theoretical framework of distributed representations and a methodology of representational analysis for the study of distributed cognitive tasks—tasks that require the processing of information distributed across the internal mind and the external environment. The basic principle of distributed representations Is that the representational system of a distributed cognitive task is a set of internal and external representations, which together represent the abstract structure of the task. The basic strategy of representational analysis is to decompose the representation of a hierarchical task into its component levels so that the representational properties at each level can be independently examined. The theoretical framework and the methodology are used to analyze the hierarchical structure of the Tower of Hanoi problem. Based on this analysis, four experiments are designed to examine the representational properties of the Tower of Hanoi. Finally, the nature of external representations is discussed.     

Executive function and theory of mind: Predictive relations from ages 2 to 4

Despite robust associations between children's theory of mind (ToM) and executive function (EF) skills, longitudinal studies examining this association remain scarce. In a socially diverse sample of 122 children (seen at ages 2, 3, and 4), this study examined (a) developmental stability of associations between ToM, EF, verbal ability, and social disadvantage; (b) continuity and change in ToM and EF; and (c) predictive relations between ToM and EF. Verbal ability and social disadvantage independently predicted changes in EF (but not ToM). Task scores improved with age and showed stable individual differences. The authors examined predictive relations between ToM and EF using partial correlations (controlling for age and verbal ability) and hierarchical regressions (that also controlled for social disadvantage and initial ToM and EF). The findings provide only partial support for the view that ToM is a prerequisite for EF but stronger support for the proposal that EF facilitates children's performance on ToM tasks.     

The Assessment of Children's Understanding of Inclusion Relations: Transitivity,Asymmetry, and Quantification

This study investigated the development of the understanding of class inclusion in children age 5, 7, and 9 years, whose performance on a qualitative class-inference task assessing their appreciation of the transitive and asymmetrical nature of inclusive relations within the animal domain was compared with their ability to make quantitative inferences in Piagetian class-inclusion problems. Results showed that, although 5-year-olds demonstrate a fair knowledge of the transitivity of inclusion relations, this notion is not fully understood until the age of 7. In contrast, the process leading to the acquisition of asymmetry understanding appears relatively slowly, and is not yet completed by 9 years of age. Whereas the ability to make qualitative inferences requiring the understanding of transitivity is acquired well before the ability to make quantitative inferences, making qualitative inferences requiring a knowledge of asymmetry is as difficult as making quantified judgments. Methodological considerations about the complementarity of the two kinds of tasks, along with the theoretical implications of our findings for Blewitt's developmental model of hierarchical knowledge, are discussed.