The curse of knowledge in reasoning about false beliefs

Assessing what other people know and believe is critical for accurately understanding human action. Young children find it difficult to reason about false beliefs (i.e., beliefs that conflict with reality). The source of this difficulty is a matter of considerable debate. Here we show that if sensitive-enough measures are used, adults show deficits in a false-belief task similar to one used with young children. In particular, we show a curse-of-knowledge bias in false-belief reasoning. That is, adults' own knowledge of an event's outcome can compromise their ability to reason about another person's beliefs about that event. We also found that adults' perception of the plausibility of an event mediates the extent of this bias. These findings shed light on the factors involved in false-belief reasoning and are discussed in light of their implications for both adults' and children's social cognition.     

儿童心理状态推理中的观点偏差

采用知识状态推理和冲突愿望推理任务考察儿童对知识状态和愿望状态推理的偏差。被试为108名3~5岁的儿童,结果表明在知识状态推理任务中,儿童对别人知识状态的推理会受到自己知识状态的影响,表现出自我中心的特点;而在冲突愿望推理任务中,与自己喜欢的情况相比,较小年龄的儿童在自己不喜欢的条件下更容易正确推理别人的愿望,表现出不对称性。因此儿童在对心理状态进行推理时具体表现出什么样的特点具有情境依赖性     

Reasoning about other people's beliefs: bilinguals have an advantage

Bilingualism can have widespread cognitive effects. In this article we investigate whether bilingualism might have an effect on adults' abilities to reason about other people's beliefs. In particular, we tested whether bilingual adults might have an advantage over monolingual adults in false-belief reasoning analogous to the advantage that has been observed with bilingual children. Using a traditional false-belief task coupled with an eye-tracking technique, we found that adults in general suffer interference from their own perspective when reasoning about other people's beliefs. However, bilinguals are reliably less susceptible to this egocentric bias than are monolinguals. Moreover, performance on the false-belief task significantly correlated with performance on an executive control task. We argue that bilinguals' early sociolinguistic sensitivity and enhanced executive control may account for their advantage in false-belief reasoning.     

错误信念任务中的知识偏差

有观点指出,年幼儿童在错误信念任务上的发展变化,不是发生了概念变化的质变,而是知识偏差的表现。知识偏差是指当我们尝试理解一个更不知情的观点时,不能忽略自己拥有的额外信息并受此影响而产生偏差的倾向。本文对知识偏差的含义及其在错误信念任务中可能产生的影响做了较为详细的综述和分析,并就在错误信念任务中消除知识偏差影响的可能性进行了探讨。     

Stereotyped beliefs about desirability: implications for characterizing the child's theory of mind

A central research issue in the child's theory of mind literature is the question of whether children appreciate the subjectivity of mental phenomena. The typical research paradigm involves researchers creating a discrepancy between children's own mental states and the mental state of a protagonist, and then asking children to predict the protagonist's reaction. A prediction that fits the child's own mental state (rather than the beliefs and desires of the protagonist) is seen as an indication that the child fails to acknowledge the subjectivity of mental phenomena.Here we present two experiments involving the use of desire statements in predicting other people's emotions which demonstrate that even when one does acknowledge the subjectivity of mental states, this does not necessarily leads to ‘correct’ predictions (e.g. predictions based on the protagonist's desires). Other factors, such as cultural knowledge, might influence this process. The first experiment demonstrates that even adults, with a fully operational theory of mind, sometimes choose to disregard information about other people's desires. Their own generalized beliefs about desirability appear to be instrumental in this respect. The second experiment, on sex-stereotyped preferences for toys, demonstrates that even young children already can use generalized beliefs about desirability as a basis for their predictions of others’ emotions, even when these beliefs on desirability do not coincide with their own desires. This strategy results in a response pattern that can be easily misconceived as an indication that the child does not yet appreciate the subjectivity of desires.Two remarks are made on the basis of these experiments. First, even a so-called ‘adult’ theory of mind tends to be affected by normative considerations and is therefore more complex than straightforward desire-belief reasoning. Second, whenever normative considerations come into play, researchers should be cautious that ‘correct’ answers in theory of mind testing may not always have been based on theory of mind reasoning, and that ‘incorrect’ answers do not necessarily imply the absence of an active theory of mind.     

儿童推断他人知识状态的知识偏差和无知偏差

采用“看见-知道”任务考察了儿童对他人知识状态推断的特点和可能存在的偏差效应。被试为90名3-5岁儿童。结果表明,3-5岁儿童已经理解他人看见即知道的关系;5岁儿童已经能准确地推断他人的知识状态,不存在偏差;但3、4岁儿童对他人知识状态的推断受到自身知识的影响且表现出自我中心的倾向：既存在知识偏差即因为自己知道而高估他人的知识,也存在无知偏差即因为自己的无知而低估他人的知识。4岁儿童的知识偏差程度与3岁儿童无异,但无知偏差低于3岁儿童,且4岁儿童的知识偏差程度大于其无知偏差,儿童克服无知偏差的时间可能早于克服知识偏差的时间。     

Cognitive load on working memory both encourages and discourages reasoning bias regarding the mental states of others

Theory of mind (ToM) refers to the ability to reason about the mental states of others. An increasing number of studies have revealed that working memory (WM) plays an important role in ToM. The present study applied WM loads to adults during a ToM task in order to investigate the impact on mental‐state reasoning performance. The task required participants to estimate the probabilities of several possible behaviours for a protagonist following the presentation of a ToM story. Participants were also required to maintain a meaningless two‐ (light WM load) or seven‐letter English alphabet string (heavy WM load) during story comprehension and mental‐state reasoning. The results show that the combination of light WM load applied during story comprehension with heavy WM load during mental‐state reasoning results in an overestimation of the probability that the protagonist's behaviour will accord with a participant's knowledge. Conversely, a heavy WM load applied during story comprehension, regardless of the type of WM load during mental‐state reasoning, did not result in this probability estimation bias. We discuss these findings from the perspective of a WM representation account.     

Is egocentric bias evidence for simulation theory?

Revised simulation theory (Goldman 2006) allows mental state attributions containing some or all of the attributor’s genuine, non-simulated mental states. It is thought that this gives the revised theory an empirical advantage, because unlike theory theory and rationality theory, it can explain egocentric bias (the tendency to over attribute ones’ own mental states to others). I challenge this view, arguing that theory theory and rationality theory can explain egocentricity by appealing to heuristic mindreading and the diagnosticity of attributors’ own beliefs, and that these explanations are as simple and consistent as those provided by revised simulation theory.     

Imbalances and Impairments in Mental State Talk of Children with Internalizing and Externalizing Problems

ABSTRACT

The aims of this study were to investigate the associations between impairments and imbalances in children’s mental state talk, attachment security and abuse/neglect experiences, and to study how much of the variance in internalizing and externalizing problems was explained by mentalization problems. The sample included 100 Turkish children (M Age = 7.00 (SD = 2.01), 38% girls) referred to a outpatient psychotherapy clinic. Children were administered an attachment-based story stem task in order to code attachment security and different categories of mental state talk, including the extent of their direction (self vs other), balance, and appropriateness. Parents and teachers filled out socio-behavioral function scales. Findings indicated a significant positive association between externalizing problems and impaired mentalization. Internalizing problems were associated with mentalizing the other at the expense of one’s own mental states and underusing emotions. Attachment insecurity and adverse experiences were associated with mentalization impairments and imbalances. Finally, underuse of emotions and self-focused mental state talk predicted internalizing problems and impaired mental state talk predicted externalizing problems at trend level of significance. Qualitative analyses supported the results, which suggest that whereas children with externalizing problems suffer from severe mentalization deficits, children with internalizing problems undermentalize about themselves and emotions.     

Children's understanding of mental states as causes of emotions

Theory of mind studies of emotion usually focus on children's ability to predict other people's feelings. This study examined children's spontaneous references to mental states in explaining others' emotions. Children (4‐, 6‐ and 10‐year‐olds, n = 122) were told stories and asked to explain both typical and atypical emotional reactions of characters. Because atypical emotional reactions are unexpected, we hypothesized that children would be more likely to refer to mental states, such as desires and beliefs, in explaining them than when explaining typical emotions. From the development of lay theories of emotion, derived the prediction that older children would refer more often to mental states than younger children. The developmental shift from a desire‐psychology to a belief‐psychology led to the expectation that references to desires would increase at an earlier age than references to beliefs. Our findings confirmed these expectations only partly, because the nature of the emotion (happiness, anger, sadness or fear) interacted with these factors. Whereas anger, happiness and sadness mainly evoked desire references, fear evoked more belief references, even in 4‐year‐olds. The fact that other factors besides age can also play an influential role in children's mental state reasoning is discussed. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Exploring mental-state reasoning as a social-cognitive mechanism for social loafing in children

The authors explored mental-state reasoning ability among 72 preschoolers (ages 3-5 years) as a possible developmental mechanism for the well-known social loafing effect: diminished individual effort in a collaborative task. The authors expected that older children would outperform young children on standard mental-state reasoning tests and that they would display greater social loafing than younger children. In addition, we hypothesized that the ability to infer the mental states of others would be predictive of social loafing, but that the ability to reason about one's own knowledge would not. The authors gave children three standard false-belief tasks and participated in a within-subjects balloon inflation task that they performed both individually and as part of a group. Results indicated that 3-year-olds performed significantly below older preschoolers on mental-state reasoning tasks. Only 4- and 5-year-olds displayed diminished individual effort. Multiple regression analysis indicated that only the ability to reason about others' false beliefs accounted for a significant amount of variance in social loafing; age (in months) and own false-belief reasoning did not. The authors discussed theoretical and pedagogical implications.     

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.     

True or false: do 5-year-olds understand belief?

In 3 studies (N = 188) we tested the hypothesis that children use a perceptual access approach to reason about mental states before they understand beliefs. The perceptual access hypothesis predicts a U-shaped developmental pattern of performance in true belief tasks, in which 3-year-olds who reason about reality should succeed, 4- to 5-year-olds who use perceptual access reasoning should fail, and older children who use belief reasoning should succeed. The results of Study 1 revealed the predicted pattern in 2 different true belief tasks. The results of Study 2 disconfirmed several alternate explanations based on possible pragmatic and inhibitory demands of the true belief tasks. In Study 3, we compared 2 methods of classifying individuals according to which 1 of the 3 reasoning strategies (reality reasoning, perceptual access reasoning, belief reasoning) they used. The 2 methods gave converging results. Both methods indicated that the majority of children used the same approach across tasks and that it was not until after 6 years of age that most children reasoned about beliefs. We conclude that because most prior studies have failed to detect young children's use of perceptual access reasoning, they have overestimated their understanding of false beliefs. We outline several theoretical implications that follow from the perceptual access hypothesis.     

Prefrontal lesion evidence against higher-order theories of consciousness

According to higher-order theories of consciousness, a mental state is conscious only when represented by another mental state. Higher-order theories must predict there to be some brain areas (or networks of areas) such that, because they produce (the right kind of) higher-order states, the disabling of them brings about deficits in consciousness. It is commonly thought that the prefrontal cortex produces these kinds of higher-order states. In this paper, I first argue that this is likely correct, meaning that, if some higher-order theory is true, prefrontal lesions should produce dramatic deficits in visual consciousness. I then survey prefrontal lesion data, looking for evidence of such deficits. I argue that no such deficits are to be found, and that this presents a compelling case against higher-order theories.     

Gaps and Barriers in Services for Children in State Mental Health Plans

Significant gaps exist in children’s mental healthcare, and barriers prevent access to existing services. Current federal initiatives call for state governmental agencies to recognize and resolve deficits in their systems of care. Previous work has acknowledged some of the problems in meeting the mental health needs of children within a system of care. This current project sought to discriminate between gaps (e.g., non-existent services) and barriers (e.g., problems that prevent access to existing services) within state mental health care plans. Because acknowledging barriers and gaps in mental health services is a step towards systems improvement, the present project describes how state governments recognize the limits of their children’s mental health care systems. We analyzed state mental health plans submitted to the federal government in applications for block grant funds. Results illustrate that a varied number of gaps and barriers are acknowledged in state plans. Overall, 90% of state plans discussed barriers and 84% of state plans discussed service gaps. The gap most frequently recognized was lack of providers (74%), while lack of funding (52%) was the most common barrier. This project points to some recognition of system limits in the states and reflects potential efforts to create policies for system improvement for children and families.     

Children are cursed: an asymmetric bias in mental-state attribution

Abstract - Young children have problems reasoning about false beliefs. We suggest that this is at least partially the result of the same curse of knowledge that has been observed in adults—a tendency to be biased by one's own knowledge when assessing the knowledge of a more naive person. We tested 3- to 5-year-old children in a knowledge-attribution task and found that young children exhibited a curse-of-knowledge bias to a greater extent than older children, a finding that is consistent with their greater difficulty with false-belief tasks. We also found that children's misattributions were asymmetric. They were limited to cases in which the children were more knowledgeable than the other person; misattributions did not occur when the children were more ignorant than the other person. This suggests that their difficulty is better characterized by the curse of knowledge than by more general egocentrism or rationality accounts.     

Motor processes in children's imagery: the case of mental rotation of hands

In a mental rotation task, children 5 and 6 years of age and adults had to decide as quickly as possible if a photograph of a hand showed a left or a right limb. The visually presented hands were left and right hands in palm or in back view, presented in four different angles of rotation. Participants had to give their responses with their own hands either in a regular, palms-down posture or in an inverted, palms-up posture. For both children and adults, variation of the posture of their own hand had a significant effect. Reaction times were longer the more awkward it was to bring their own hand into the position shown in the stimulus photograph. These results, together with other converging evidence, strongly suggest that young children's kinetic imagery is guided by motor processes, even more so than adults'.     

Aging and Language Production

Experimental research and older adults' reports of their own experience suggest that the ability to produce the spoken forms of familiar words declines with aging. Older adults experience more word-finding failures, such as tip-of-the-tongue states, than young adults do, and this and other speech production failures appear to stem from difficulties in retrieving the sounds of words. Recent evidence has identified a parallel age-related decline in retrieving the spelling of familiar words. Models of cognitive aging must explain why these aspects of language production decline with aging whereas semantic processes are well maintained. We describe a model wherein aging weakens connections among linguistic representations, thereby reducing the transmission of excitation from one representation to another. The structure of the representational systems for word phonology and orthography makes them vulnerable to transmission deficits, impairing retrieval.     

When Mental States Matter,When They Don't,and What That Means for Morality

Research has shown that moral judgments depend on the capacity to engage in mental state reasoning. In this article, we will first review behavioral and neural evidence for the role of mental states (e.g., people's beliefs, desires, intentions) in judgments of right and wrong. Second, we will consider cases where mental states appear at first to matter less (i.e., when people assign moral blame for accidents and when explicit information about mental states is missing). Third, we will consider cases where mental states, in fact, matter less, specifically, in cases of “purity” violations (e.g., committing incest, consuming taboo foods). We will discuss how and why mental states do not matter equivalently across the multi‐dimensional space of morality. In the fourth section of this article, we will elaborate on the possibility that norms against harmful actions and norms against “impure” actions serve distinct functions – for regulating interpersonal interactions (i.e., harm) versus for protecting the self (i.e., purity). In the fifth and final section, we will speculate on possible differences in how we represent and reason about other people's mental states versus our own beliefs and intentions. In addressing these issues, we aim to provide insight into the complex structure and distinct functions of mental state reasoning and moral cognition. We conclude that mental state reasoning allows us to make sense of other moral agents in order to understand their past actions, to predict their future behavior, and to evaluate them as potential friends or foes.     

Effects of children's emotional state on their reactions to emotional expressions: A search for congruency effects

Abstract

Three groups of 30 six-year-old children were tested to examine whether one's own happy or sad mood state causes a specific preference for happy or sad expressions in others, a systematic bias in the labelling of ambiguous expressions, and a selective memory for happy or sad expressions. In two of these groups, a happy or sad mood state was induced by a mental imagery procedure. The third group served as control subjects. It was found that all groups showed a distinct preference for happy faces. Happy children, however, tended to opt for extremely happy faces, whereas sad children chose mildly happy expressions. Furthermore, children (especially the children that received a happy mood induction) were inclined to interpret ambiguous expressions as being congruent with their own mood state. Finally, the “sad” group recalled fewer expressions correctly than the other two, irrespective of the nature of these expressions. Overall, the happy face was more often correctly identified than the sad one.