Children do not follow the rule "ignorance means getting it wrong"

Two experiments tested whether 4- and 5-year-olds follow the rule “ignorance means you get it wrong.” Following this rule should lead children to infer that a character who is ignorant about some situation will also have a false belief about it. This rule should sometimes lead children into error because ignorance does not imply false belief. In Experiment 1, children and adults were told about a girl who is looking for her dog but does not know which of two boxes it is under. Most children predicted that the girl would look in the box with the dog and not in the empty box; adults chose both boxes equally. Experiment 2 used a similar story but varied whether the girl wants to approach or avoid her dog. Again, most children predicted that the girl would succeed. These findings suggest that children do not follow the rule “ignorance means you get it wrong.”     

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.     

Can chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) discriminate appearance from reality?

A milestone in human development is coming to recognize that how something looks is not necessarily how it is. We tested appearance-reality understanding in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) with a task requiring them to choose between a small grape and a big grape. The apparent relative size of the grapes was reversed using magnifying and minimizing lenses so that the truly bigger grape appeared to be the smaller one. Our Lens test involved a basic component adapted from standard procedures for children, as well as several components designed to rule out alternative explanations. There were large individual differences in performance, with some chimpanzees’ responses suggesting they appreciated the appearance-reality distinction. In contrast, all chimpanzees failed a Reverse Contingency control test, indicating that those who passed the Lens test did not do so by learning a simple reverse contingency rule. Four-year-old children given an adapted version of the Lens test failed it while 4.5-year-olds passed. Our study constitutes the first direct investigation of appearance-reality understanding in chimpanzees and the first cross-species comparison of this capacity.     

Comprehension of the representational mind in infancy

A broad array of infant studies are reviewed that appear to be consistent with the idea that belief understanding specifically, and mental attribution generally, emerge much earlier than previously acknowledged. We first examine existing false-belief research, which, while confirming that children under 4 years perform poorly on standard tests, suggests nevertheless that they have more implicit understanding of beliefs than they can express. After surveying theories that both favor and reject early development of theory of mind (TOM), we address two recent bodies of visual fixation research that provide support for the possibility of knowledge and belief attribution in infancy. The first indicates that infants of 13–15 months are sensitive to others’ false beliefs (and therefore have a representational TOM), the second, that by 12 months or younger infants have two antecedently related psychological understandings: (a) that when agents look they “see” and (b) that seeing plays a presumptive role in producing knowledge. This raises the broader question of whether “mentalism” might be part of core knowledge, which takes us to the earliest manifestation of psychological attribution, the construal of agentive behavior as intentional. Contrary to previous assumptions, recent studies indicate that infants of 3–9 months do not accord intentionality exclusively to humans or to self-propelled objects but rather to any entity that: (1) chooses flexibly among means and ends, (2) responds non-randomly to social overtures, and (3) reacts rationally to changing circumstances (i.e., that is not a mere automaton but is selectively and adaptively responsive to the environment). Other evidence is then examined which suggests that infants begin to construe these and other behaviors in mentalist rather than teleological terms much earlier than expected. Finally, the implications of this empirical record for domain-specific and domain-general theories of TOM are considered.     

儿童反语理解的心理机制

反语是指使用与本意相反的字面形式表达本意的一种修辞形式,在儿童言语发展领域中是一种难度较大的认知对象。该对儿童在反语理解任务中的困难根源进行了探讨,介绍了目前关于儿童反语理解的心理机制研究的两种主要途径,一是采用成人反语识别理论去解释儿童反语理解的心理过程,二是从二阶心理理论角度开展的解释儿童反语理解的心理机制的尝试,最后在暗示假装理论和二阶心理理论的框架下对现有的研究证据进行了整合的讨论,并对未来研究提出了建议。     

发明本心 易备于我——李顒治易思想浅说

李强调为易旨在洗心 ,反对为易而易 ,认为习易贵在自得 ,故应易备于我、求易于己 ,主张治易当实以足下 ,发明易理。     

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

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. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Do Theory of Mind and Executive Function Deficits Underlie the Adverse Outcomes Associated with Profound Early Deprivation?: Findings from the English and Romanian Adoptees Study

Theory of Mind (ToM) and Executive Function (EF) have been associated with autism and with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and hence might play a role in similar syndromes found following profound early institutional deprivation. In order to examine this possibility the current study included a group of 165 Romanian adoptees, of whom 144 were adopted into the UK from deprived institutional settings before 43months of age, and a group of 52 within-UK adoptees, all adopted before 6months of age. Both groups were assessed at 6 and 11years. The Strange Stories task was used to assess ToM and the Stroop task was used to assess EF, both at age 11. The Romanian adoptees displayed deficits in both ToM and EF compared with the within-UK adoptee group. The degree of deficit was greater for children who had experienced more than 6months of institutional deprivation. Deficits in both domains (ToM and EF) were associated with each of the three apparently deprivation-specific problems, namely quasi-autism, disinhibited attachment and inattention/overactivity. Statistical analyses indicated a mediating role for both ToM and EF with respect to quasi-autism; possibly a partial mediating role for EF with respect to inattention/overactivity; and probably no mediating role for either ToM or EF in the case of disinhibited attachment. In conclusion, there is evidence for a possible mediating role for ToM and EF in the development of some apparently deprivation-specific difficulties in institution-reared Romanian adoptees, but neither accounts for the overall pattern of deprivation-related difficulties.     

The role of preschoolers' social understanding in evaluating the informativeness of causal interventions

Preschoolers use information from interventions, namely intentional actions, to make causal inferences. We asked whether children consider some interventions to be more informative than others based on two components of an actor’s knowledge state: whether an actor possesses causal knowledge, and whether an actor is allowed to use their knowledge in a given situation. Three- and four-year-olds saw a novel toy that activated in the presence of certain objects. Two actors, one knowledgeable about the toy and one ignorant, each tried to activate the toy with an object. In Experiment 1, either the actors chose objects or the child chose for them. In Experiment 2, the actors chose objects blindfolded. Objects were always placed on the toy simultaneously, and thus were equally associated with the effect. Preschoolers’ causal inferences favored the knowledgeable actor’s object only when he was allowed to choose it (Experiment 1). Thus, children consider both personal and situational constraints on knowledge when evaluating the informativeness of causal interventions.