Preschoolers' understanding of stable and changeable characteristics

Most adults can easily distinguish between stable characteristics, which affect personal identity, and changeable ones, which are free to vary within an individual. The purpose of this study was to investigate preschoolers' developing knowledge of stable (identity, gender, and race), changeable (mood, weight, and health), and changeable-but-irreversible (age and height) characteristics using pictorial and question tasks. In the first two experiments, 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children and adults were asked to judge whether two pictures could represent the same person. Children in these experiments understood stable properties more clearly than changeable or irreversible ones. Children who made mistakes tended to treat changes in variable characteristics as if they altered personal identity. In Experiment 3, subjects answered questions about the stability or variability of the same characteristics. Children tested with questions in Experiment 3 showed a better understanding of stable and variable characteristics than did children tested with pictures in Experiments 1 and 2. Most of the children who erred in Experiment 3 understood stable attributes but treated changeable ones as if they were constant; however, a minority of children understood changeable properties but treated stable ones as if they were variable. These findings provide new information about how children understand and misunderstand the status of personal attributes.     

Preschoolers' understanding of pretense and presumption of congruity between action and representation

In a series of 4 studies, A. S. Lillard's (1993) paradigm for studying preschoolers' understanding of pretense was replicated and systematically examined. The design varied the extent of the contradiction built into Lillard's format. Decreases in contradictory information yielded increases in the incidence of correct judgments indicative of an implicitly representational understanding of pretense. The findings present a challenge to A. S. Lillard's (1993) conceptual analysis of pretense and suggest that methods adopted from the classic false-belief paradigm of H. Wimmer and J. Perner (1983) may be inappropriate for assessing preschoolers' understanding of pretense.     

Preschoolers' understanding of knowing-that and knowing-how in the United States and Hong Kong

Two experiments on preschoolers' understanding of the effects of exposure on knowing-that and knowing-how were conducted with 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children (N=388) in 2 locations: a small midwestern city in the United States and a suburban area of Hong Kong, China. By using both English- and Chinese-speaking samples, the authors examined differences in children's understanding of knowing-that and knowing-how as well as the impact of different types of linguistic markers on the understanding of these concepts. Across both studies, in both locations, and for judging the knowledge of self or of others, children's understanding for knowing-that preceded their understanding for knowing-how. Implications of these findings both for universal patterns of theory-of-mind development and for how culture may impact on that development are discussed.     

Parenting and Preschoolers' Symptoms as a Function of Child Gender and SES

ABSTRACT

Improving parental discipline practices is a central target of behavioral parent training programs, but little research has examined how discipline varies as a function of gender. Based on the assumption that socialization practices might be related to gender differences in psychopathology, we examined relations between parenting and problem behaviors in children. We predicted that parents would be overreactive toward children displaying symptoms inconsistent with gender stereotypes and lax towards those with gender stereotype-consistent behavior. Parents of 112 preschool-aged children reported on their children's externalizing and internalizing symptoms, and their own lax and overreactive parenting. As hypothesized, internalizing symptoms in girls and externalizing symptoms in boys predicted lax parenting, while externalizing behaviors in girls and internalizing symptoms in boys were associated with overreactive parenting. Exploratory analyses suggest that relations differed somewhat as a function of sociocultural status, pointing to the need for future studies to consider social context.     

Cerebral mechanisms for understanding emotional prosody in speech

Hemispheric contributions to the processing of emotional speech prosody were investigated by comparing adults with a focal lesion involving the right (n = 9) or left (n = 11) hemisphere and adults without brain damage (n = 12). Participants listened to semantically anomalous utterances in three conditions (discrimination, identification, and rating) which assessed their recognition of five prosodic emotions under the influence of different task- and response-selection demands. Findings revealed that right- and left-hemispheric lesions were associated with impaired comprehension of prosody, although possibly for distinct reasons: right-hemisphere compromise produced a more pervasive insensitivity to emotive features of prosodic stimuli, whereas left-hemisphere damage yielded greater difficulties interpreting prosodic representations as a code embedded with language content.     

The neural mechanisms of inter-temporal decision-making: understanding variability

Humans and animals prefer immediate over delayed rewards (delay discounting). This preference for smaller-but-sooner over larger-but-later rewards shows substantial interindividual variability in healthy subjects. Moreover, a strong bias towards immediate reinforcement characterizes many psychiatric conditions such as addiction and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. We discuss the neural mechanisms underlying delay discounting and describe how interindividual variability (trait effects) in the neural instantiation of subprocesses of delay discounting (such as reward valuation, cognitive control and prospection) contributes to differences in behaviour. We next discuss different interventions that can partially remedy impulsive decision-making (state effects). Although the precise neural mechanisms underlying many of these modulating influences are only beginning to be unravelled, they point towards novel treatment approaches for disorders of impulse control.     

Intact and impaired mechanisms of action understanding in autism

Typically developing children understand and predict others' behavior by extracting and processing relevant information such as the logic of their actions within the situational constraints and the intentions conveyed by their gaze direction and emotional expressions. Children with autism have difficulties understanding and predicting others' actions. With the use of eye tracking and behavioral measures, we investigated action understanding mechanisms used by 18 children with autism and a well-matched group of 18 typically developing children. Results showed that children with autism (a) consider situational constraints in order to understand the logic of an agent's action and (b) show typical usage of the agent's emotional expressions to infer his or her intentions. We found (c) subtle atypicalities in the way children with autism respond to an agent's direct gaze and (d) marked impairments in their ability to attend to and interpret referential cues such as a head turn for understanding an agent's intentions.     

Enactment as understanding and as misunderstanding

The author considers the concept of enactment as a ubiquitous event that is best seen as part of a sequence in the process of understanding a patient. As such, enactments are not unusual or special save as they are often subject to disavowal or to being singled out by the analyst as especially subject to scrutiny. Once recognized, enactments need to be interpreted: not so much in terms of their unconscious origins, but more with regard to the need to include them in the analytic dialogue.     

Preschoolers' extension of familiar adjectives

In two experiments, we examined the role of labels in guiding preschoolers' extension of three types of familiar adjectives: emotional state adjectives, physiological state adjectives, and trait adjectives. On each trial, we labeled a target animal with one of the three different types of adjectives and asked whether these terms could apply to a subordinate-level match, a basic-level match, a superordinate-level match, or an inanimate object. In Experiment 1, participants extended trait adjectives, but not emotional or physiological adjectives, to members of the same basic-level category, regardless of whether an explicit basic-level label was provided for the target animal. Similarly, children in Experiment 2 also extended trait adjectives to the members of the same basic-level category, even when explicit superordinate- and subordinate-level labels were provided for the target animals. Together, these results demonstrate that children appreciate that emotional and physiological adjectives cannot be generalized to the same extent as can trait adjectives, and the results document the privileged status of basic-level categories in preschoolers' extension of trait adjectives.     

Action understanding as inverse planning

Humans are adept at inferring the mental states underlying other agents’ actions, such as goals, beliefs, desires, emotions and other thoughts. We propose a computational framework based on Bayesian inverse planning for modeling human action understanding. The framework represents an intuitive theory of intentional agents’ behavior based on the principle of rationality: the expectation that agents will plan approximately rationally to achieve their goals, given their beliefs about the world. The mental states that caused an agent’s behavior are inferred by inverting this model of rational planning using Bayesian inference, integrating the likelihood of the observed actions with the prior over mental states. This approach formalizes in precise probabilistic terms the essence of previous qualitative approaches to action understanding based on an “intentional stance” [Dennett, D. C. (1987). The intentional stance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press] or a “teleological stance” [Gergely, G., Nádasdy, Z., Csibra, G., & Biró, S. (1995). Taking the intentional stance at 12 months of age. Cognition, 56, 165-193]. In three psychophysical experiments using animated stimuli of agents moving in simple mazes, we assess how well different inverse planning models based on different goal priors can predict human goal inferences. The results provide quantitative evidence for an approximately rational inference mechanism in human goal inference within our simplified stimulus paradigm, and for the flexible nature of goal representations that human observers can adopt. We discuss the implications of our experimental results for human action understanding in real-world contexts, and suggest how our framework might be extended to capture other kinds of mental state inferences, such as inferences about beliefs, or inferring whether an entity is an intentional agent.     

Preschoolers' fantasy-reality distinctions of emotional events

Research suggests that emotions influence children's ability to discern fantasy from reality; however, reasons for this association remain unknown. The current research sought to better understand the mechanisms underlying children's distinctions by examining the roles discrete emotions and context have in 3- to 5-year-olds' evaluations of fantasy and reality. In Study 1, children's fantasy-reality distinctions of images depicting happy, frightening, or sad events were obtained under two conditions: Children responded freely or were motivated to respond accurately. When responding freely, older children reported that happy and sad fantastic and real events could occur but frightening events could not. When motivated to respond accurately, children's accuracy improved for fantasy but not for reality. Study 2 examined real events exclusively and found that children may lack the knowledge that frightening, but not happy or sad, real events can occur. The findings provide new insight into how emotions affect children's fantasy-reality distinctions.     

学前儿童道德责任意识的发展研究

该文通过个别访谈的方法,考察了96名3～5岁幼儿依据允许性、可变性、权成依赖性以及规则依赖性四种判断标准对同伴、以及成人主人公的道德行为判断及其归因。结果显示,多数学前儿童都能根据不同的判断标准对主人公行为做出符合道德规则的判断,表现出较强的道德责任意识,且这一意识在3～4、5岁之间获得了较为显著的发展,尤其是在权威依赖性标准上。归因分析显示近1／4的幼儿明确采用相应的道德规则对主人公的行为作出解释。这些结果支持认知发展的领域特殊论,揭示出学前儿童很早就发展起来的道德责任,这对当前的道德教育和公民教育实践具有一定启示意义。     

幼儿朴素理论发展的研究现状

朴素物理学、朴素生物学和朴素心理学是幼儿朴素理论发展的三个核心领域,本体集合、因果原则集合和内部一致的知识体系则是朴素理论的三个重要成分。该文以幼儿对三个核心领域的因果认知发展为中心,以朴素理论三个重要组成成分为线索,对近期幼儿朴素理论发展的研究成果进行了简要的介绍和讨论,并提出进一步研究所需要解决的问题。     

Preschoolers' comprehension of goal structure in narratives

Preschool children's understanding and use of goals were studied in two experiments. Children heard stories in the presence of pictures or props. The stories were varied by goal success occurring early or late in the story, with late goal success resulting in more causal connections in the narrative. The results showed that children recalled goals spontaneously and that their recall benefited from goal structure of the stories. Pictures benefited the children when the stories were short. Enactment of the props versus static displays of the props did not enhance recall in the second experiment. Preschool children thus demonstrated ability to infer and use goal and causal information in stories for both picture and object support.     

Preschoolers' comprehension of goal structure in narratives

Preschool children's understanding and use of goals were studied in two experiments. Children heard stories in the presence of pictures or props. The stories were varied by goal success occurring early or late in the story, with late goal success resulting in more causal connections in the narrative. The results showed that children recalled goals spontaneously and that their recall benefited from goal structure of the stories. Pictures benefited the children when the stories were short. Enactment of the props versus static displays of the props did not enhance recall in the second experiment. Preschool children thus demonstrated ability to infer and use goal and causal information in stories for both picture and object support.     

家庭社会经济地位对幼儿良好行为习惯的影响:父母教养方式与幼儿心理素质的中介作用

幼儿时期是培养个体良好行为习惯的重要关键期。以814名幼儿及其家长为研究对象,探讨家庭社会经济地位与幼儿良好行为习惯的关系,以及父母教养方式和幼儿心理素质的中介作用。结果表明：（1）家庭社会经济地位与幼儿良好行为习惯显著正相关;（2）父母教养方式与幼儿心理素质在家庭社会经济地位和良好行为习惯间起连续中介作用,且权威型教养方式与心理素质的链式中介作用显著高于专制型教养方式与心理素质的链式中介作用。因此,要促进幼儿养成良好行为习惯,应注重父母教养方式的选择与幼儿心理素质的培养。     

家庭社会经济地位对幼儿良好行为习惯的影响:父母教养方式与幼儿心理素质的中介作用

幼儿时期是培养个体良好行为习惯的重要关键期。以814名幼儿及其家长为研究对象,探讨家庭社会经济地位与幼儿良好行为习惯的关系,以及父母教养方式和幼儿心理素质的中介作用。结果表明：（1）家庭社会经济地位与幼儿良好行为习惯显著正相关;（2）父母教养方式与幼儿心理素质在家庭社会经济地位和良好行为习惯间起连续中介作用,且权威型教养方式与心理素质的链式中介作用显著高于专制型教养方式与心理素质的链式中介作用。因此,要促进幼儿养成良好行为习惯,应注重父母教养方式的选择与幼儿心理素质的培养。     

Discovery as a means to understanding

Two experiments were conducted to determine whether the discovery of a conditional rule from its instances facilitated a test of its truth from partially concealed information, compared with a situation in which the rule was presented directly. In the first experiment the subjects who discovered the rule expressed it in their own words. The results showed that they tested it significantly better than a control group who were presented with the rule, as expressed by the subjects in the experimental group. In the second experiment the subjects in the experimental group were compelled to express the rule in the form of a conditional sentence. The results showed again that they performed significantly better than those in a corresponding control group.