Children's Understanding of Mental Phenomena

doi:10.1016/S0065-2407(08)60412-7

Advances in Child Development and Behavior

Volume 22, 1989, Pages 41-87

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2407(08)60412-7 Get rights and content

Publisher Summary

This chapter provides a mix of findings, some of which are definitive and others intriguingly suggestive. That young children are ontological realists can no longer be considered tenable. The data make it abundantly clear that the beginning theory of mind is one of ontological dualism, which is probably combined with some form of epistemological realism. These conclusions about early understanding of mental phenomena are based on findings concerning young children's reflection on and conception of their own and others' mental experience, their awareness, understanding, and control of imagery, as well as their conceptions of other kinds of things, such as photographs, smoke, and shadows. This interwoven set of findings seems fitting-mental phenomena themselves are complex, multifaceted, and interrelated. Philosophy of mind and cognitive science take as their domain a host of related phenomena and processes. Young children's conceptions seem to mirror this complexity in scope, if not in sophistication; even very young children are beginning to recognize and think about a variety of mental phenomena. Furthermore, young children demonstrate at least one firm foothold in this complex and potentially confusing domain—namely, a solid and articulate understanding of the fundamental differences between mental entities and physical objects.

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Humans are the only species that engages in sustained, complex pretend play. As pretend play is practically ubiquitous across cultures, it might support or afford a context for developmental advances during the juvenile period that have implications for functioning in adulthood. Early in development, learning to separate our thoughts from reality is practiced in pretend play and is associated with changes not just in cognition, but in emotional and social domains as well. Specifically, pretend play affords opportunities to engage in abstractions that could support abilities such as perspective-taking, emotion recognition and regulation, and cooperation and negotiation in childhood. In turn, the abstraction skills promoted by early pretend play might underlie creativity, innovation, and our capacity to feel empathy and moral obligation to others in later childhood and adulthood. In fact, because pretend play affords sharing our abstractions with others, it might be an early context for behaviors that ultimately promote the shared abstractions of human culture itself.
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Recent experimental evidence suggests that engaging in pretend play can improve children's executive functions (EFs). Yet, evidence regarding how play relates to the development of EF remains sparse. The current study investigated whether preschoolers’ social and solitary pretend play over the course of one preschool year predicted growth in inhibitory control, a key component of EF. Participants were 132 Spanish-speaking preschoolers (M_age = 53 months) from 10 Head Start classrooms in the southwest United States. Multiple 15-s naturalistic observations of children's interactions (e.g., social, solitary) and activities (e.g., pretense, non-pretense) were gathered across free-play classroom contexts. Among observed play behaviors, social pretense was the only predictor of inhibitory control growth in preschool contexts. The current study speaks to the importance of continued research on play-based interventions, especially in diverse populations, and corroborates a growing body of theoretical and empirical evidence for the importance of pretend play in the development of EF.
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More research is needed to better understand how pretense might influence EF development so that any potential underlying mechanisms can be thoughtfully incorporated into future classroom curricula. For example, it is possible that engaging in pretend play requires inhibitory control as children overcome the constraints of reality, cognitive flexibility as children shift their attention between pretense and reality, and working memory as children remember the rules and scripts of their pretend scenarios (Estes et al., 1989; Golumb & Kuersten, 1996; Thibodeau et al., 2016; Vygotsky, 1978). Therefore, pretense, especially unstructured child-directed pretense, may inherently strengthen EF by allowing children to inadvertently practice these skills during their play.
Growing evidence highlights the importance of executive functions (EFs) for optimal development. Unfortunately, existing literature documents compounding deficits in EF due to the stressors associated with poverty. Recent research supports a positive relationship between pretense and EF, but few studies have examined the longitudinal association between these variables in a low-income sample. As such, the current study investigated whether pretend play behaviors among a sample of 191 Head Start preschoolers predicted EF outcomes in first grade, and whether pretend play mitigated the adverse consequences of cumulative risk on children’s EF development. Results revealed a positive, prospective relationship between pretense in preschool and EF in first grade. In addition, pretend play moderated a negative association between cumulative risk in preschool and EF outcomes in first grade, with the association being weaker for children who engaged in more pretend play relative to those who engaged in less pretend play. Follow-up analyses suggest that pretend play may be particularly important for the inhibitory control aspect of EF in this sample.
Children's imagination and belief: Prone to flights of fancy or grounded in reality?
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However, it is unlikely that children interpreted the questions about their imagination in this way. First, young children can distinguish between phenomena that they are asked to “imagine” and phenomena that they have perceived in real life (Estes et al., 1989; Wellman & Estes, 1986; Woolley & Wellman, 1993). Second, if some children did misinterpret the question, it might be expected that the youngest children would do so most often.
Children ranging from 4 to 8 years (n = 39) reported whether they could imagine various improbable phenomena (e.g., a person making onion juice) as well as various impossible phenomena (e.g., a person turning an onion into a banana) and then described what they imagined. In their descriptions, children mentioned ordinary causes much more often than extraordinary causes. Descriptions of such ordinary causes were provided more often in relation to improbable (rather than impossible) phenomena. Following these imaginative efforts, children judged if each phenomenon could really happen. To check whether these reality judgments were affected by children’s attempts to imagine, a control group (n = 39) made identical reality judgments but were not first prompted to imagine each phenomenon. Children across the age range judged that impossible phenomena cannot really happen but, with increasing age, judged that improbable phenomena can happen. This pattern emerged in both the imagination and control groups; thus simply prompting children to imagine did not alter their reality judgments. However, within the imagination group, judgments that phenomena can really happen were associated with children’s claims to have successfully imagined the phenomena and with certain characteristics of their descriptions: imagining ordinary causes and imagining phenomena obtain. Results highlight close links between imagination and reality judgments in childhood. Contrary to the notion that young children have a rich imagination that readily defies reality, results indicate that their imagination is grounded in reality, as are their beliefs.
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Another possibility is that the act of engaging in fantasy-oriented behaviors facilitates the development of EFs. Similar to the cognitive flexibility needed for bilingualism, the act of engaging in imaginary play and having imaginary companions requires that children switch back and forth between fantasy and reality (Estes, Wellman, & Woolley, 1989; Golumb & Kuersten, 1996) and, thus, use working memory to remember pretense rules and scripts, inhibit using pretense scripts in real life, and shift attention back and forth between reality and pretense. Therefore, it seems logical that FO would be related in some fashion to EF development.
Although recent correlational studies have found a relationship between fantasy orientation (FO; i.e., a child’s propensity to play in a fantastical realm) and higher order cognitive skills called executive functions (EFs), no work has addressed the causality and directionality of this relationship. The current study experimentally examined the directionality of the observed relationship between FO and EF development in preschool-aged children through an innovative play intervention employing a randomized controlled design. A sample of 110 children between the ages of 3 and 5 years were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: fantastical pretend-play intervention, non-imaginative play intervention, or business-as-usual control. Results revealed that children who participated in a 5-week fantastical pretend-play intervention showed improvements in EFs, whereas children in the other two conditions did not. Within the fantastical pretend-play condition, children who were highly engaged in the play and those who were highly fantastical demonstrated the greatest gains in EFs. These data provide evidence for the equifinal relationship between fantasy-oriented play and EF development, such that engaging in fantasy-oriented play may be one of many ways to directly enhance EF development.
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Wellman and colleagues have shown that by age 3 children understand much about mental states such as thoughts, emotions, dreams, and imagination (Estes, Wellman, & Woolley, 1989; Wellman & Estes, 1986; Woolley & Wellman, 1993). Specifically, work by Wellman and Estes (1986), Estes et al. (1989)) showed that children understand that people have mental states even though mental states cannot be seen in the same way as physical entities. Others have shown that by age 4 or 5 children understand the existence of germs and other invisible particles (e.g., sugar dissolved in water), and can use them to reason about cause and effect (Au, Sidle, & Rollins, 1993; Kalish, 1996; Rosen & Rozin, 1993).
One of the most striking examples of appearance–reality discrepancy is invisibility—when something has no appearance yet still exists. The issue of invisibility sits at the juncture of two foundational ontological distinctions, that between appearance and reality and that between reality and non-reality. We probed the invisibility concepts of 47 3–7-year-olds using two sets of tasks: (1) an entity task, in which children were queried about the visibility and reality status of a variety of both visible and invisible entities, and (2) two standard appearance–reality tasks. Results showed that children's concepts of visibility and reality status are intertwined, and that an understanding that some entities are impossible to see develops between the ages of 3 and 7.

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Children's Understanding of Mental Phenomena

Publisher Summary

Cognitive Psychology

Cognitive Psychology

A semi-graphical method for the analysis of complex problems

Technometrics

Development of concepts of self, mind, reality, and knowledge

Learning, remembering, and understanding

Studies in cognitive growth

Social-cognitive development

Developmental changes in contribution of shared experience to social role taking competence

International Journal of Behavioral Development

Brainstorms

Verbal reports as data

Psychological Review