Children's understanding of interpretation
Section snippets
Children's understanding of interpretation
When do children first know—as most adults seem to know—that they and others can share one and the same experience and yet come away with markedly different (perhaps even legitimately different) interpretations? When is it, you have every reason to wonder, that they round the first interpretive turn, and join their elders in finally recognizing that what people imagine to be the case about any given object of knowledge is often highly person-relative and remote from the unvarnished truth? Every
False beliefs about false beliefs
If, relieved of the excess theoretical baggage piled on by representational theorists of mind, one were to set out light and in the hope of actually determining when it is that young persons first awaken to the possibility that two individuals, exposed to one and the same potential object of knowledge, might, nevertheless, emerge with importantly different beliefs, then at least one minimal procedural condition would obviously have to be satisfied. The epistemic opportunities facing both such
Finding an alternative methodology
Among the numerous options that present themselves as potential procedural means of assessing children's emerging capacity to appreciate the interpretive character of the knowing process, two possibilities especially recommend themselves. One of these turns upon the fact that it is possible to identify a small class of stimuli that, whether by nature or design, turn out to have the unique feature of reliably prompting two—and only two—especially likely interpretations. Homophones are instances
Study 1
As discussed above, droodles would be useful for the purpose of assessing children's interpretive capabilities only if they could first be shown to be legitimate objects of interpretation for adults. That is, unless adults, whose interpretive capabilities are largely beyond dispute, can be prompted to provide more than one interpretation of such stimuli, or otherwise give clear evidence of seeing that such drawings are meant to afford multiple interpretations, there would be little real point
Study 2
If the aim of this research was to entice children who are capable of doing so into commenting upon differing interpretations of one and the same thing, then, one might wonder, why not simply show them a droodle and ask them what they and another person might think? The problem is this. It is entirely possible under such circumstances that when the full details of the larger picture are unknown, children may assume that the task is one of discovering what the picture “really” is, and so give
Study 3
It may be that children simply need a little help in order to display their understanding of interpretation. Taylor (1988) found that training trials with restricted views had a positive effect on 4-year-old participants’ ability to predict that a puppet (who had seen only a restricted view) would not know the contents of the larger picture of which the droodle is only a fractional part. In Study 3 this manipulation was replicated with the addition of a second puppet in an effort to determine
Study 4
Studies 2 and 3 establish that passing measures of false belief understanding is no guarantee of similar success on interpretive versions of the droodles task. Perhaps, the cautious reviewer of such findings might suppose, even children who are interpretive might find it difficult to give more than one interpretation of a restricted view simply because the saliency of the underlying picture overwhelms their interpretive capabilities by requiring all of their efforts to edit out their own
Study 5
It could be argued that, despite the inclusion of a seventh droodle in Study 4, one cannot be sure that the failure of some children to give interpretive responses is not still somehow an artifact of the stimuli used rather than a conceptual difficulty on the part of the participant. What we really need to know, then, is whether or not children can easily generate alternative interpretations, not of cryptic line drawn pictures in general (as the data from the seventh droodle shows), but of the
Study 6
In Study 5 children capable of assigning a false belief to Ann occasionally—even when told not to—merely repeated themselves when asked what Andy thought. Perhaps, one final argument goes, the problem is a lack of alternatives. If such children could be provided with some ready alternative belief to assign to Andy, they could suddenly be made to appear on the Interpretive side of the ledger. One could, for example, add a pre-test trial, similar to the procedure followed in Study 5, in which
An overall test
All that really remains is to conduct some omnibus comparison of the false belief and interpretive abilities across all of the children studied in this sequence of experiments. This can be accomplished by examining the performance of individual children on all those occasions when they had access to the full picture but the puppet did not: 189 children were given a total of 816 opportunities to demonstrate their understanding of false belief and to demonstrate an understanding of
General discussion
The overall aim of the sequence of studies just reported was to investigate young children's earliest insights into the interpretive nature of knowing. It was argued that, at a minimum, such insight would need to encompass an understanding that it is possible for two persons to be exposed to precisely the same information or stimulus event and yet to arrive at different opinions about what is still the self-same reality. To understand mental life in this way would mark one as having acquired a
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by a doctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to the first author, and by a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada grant to the second author. We would like to thank Lou Moses for his help in the early stages of this research. Thanks are also due to the children, staff, and parents of Spare Time Centre. Requests for reprints should be sent to: Christopher Lalonde, Department of Psychology, University
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Looking for the lighthouse: A systematic review of advanced theory-of-mind tests beyond preschool
2022, Developmental ReviewCitation Excerpt :Definitions and operationalizations of AToM are diverse (Wellman, 2018), and a lack of consensus remains as to which tests are used as valid and reliable ways to assess such a multidimensional concept of mindreading skills. Based on past studies (Hayward & Homer, 2017; Osterhaus et al., 2016; Warnell & Redcay, 2019), typical measures of AToM include assessments of children’s and adolescents’ (a) higher-order false belief understanding (Liddle & Nettle, 2006; Perner & Wimmer, 1985; Sullivan et al., 1994); (b) their understanding of nonliteral speech, as assessed by the strange stories (Happé, 1994); (c) their ability to make inferences form nonverbal cues, such as the ability to read the mind in the eyes (Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test or RMET; Baron-Cohen et al., 2001); (d) the ability to interpret (ambiguous) social situations (Bosacki, 2000; Devine & Hughes, 2013); (e) the ability to recognize a social blunder or faux pas (Baron-Cohen et al., 1999); (f) the ability to navigate simulated social interactions (Canty, Neumann, Fleming, et al., 2017; Keysar et al., 2000); (g) the ascription of mental states to non-human, inanimate objects, such as assessed with the Frith-Happé triangles test (Abell et al., 2000; Castelli et al., 2000); and (h) constructivist ToM, which measures children’s and adolescents’ ability to reason about perceptual ambiguity (Carpendale & Chandler, 1996; Lalonde & Chandler, 2002). Table 1 provides an overview of these and other AToM tests, explains their content, and reports whether the distinct tests are, first and foremost, measures of developmental or individual differences.
Beyond literal depiction: Children's flexible understanding of pictures
2021, Journal of Experimental Child PsychologyCitation Excerpt :Consequently, our results still leave open different possible roles for the above-mentioned factors in children’s flexible interpretations of pictures. The overall age-related changes observed could have also been driven by the development of an interpretive theory of mind (iToM) (Doherty & Wimmer, 2005; Lalonde & Chandler, 2002). Carpendale and Lewis (2006) defined iToM as the “commonsense understanding that the mind itself influences how the world is experienced” (p. 193), and it is linked to the recognition that a picture can have two or more different interpretations.
Relations between intensionality, theory of mind and complex syntax in autism spectrum conditions and typical development
2021, Cognitive DevelopmentCitation Excerpt :Osterhaus, Koerber, and Sodian (2016) found that even 10 year-olds retain difficulties in reasoning about visually ambiguous objects (e.g. duck-rabbit) and how others would perceive these (see also Carpendale & Chandler, 1996). This could suggest that metarepresentational capacities are not unidimensional, evolving in a single developmental ‘Big Bang’, but that they are multidimensional and mature in stages, with substantial conceptual changes taking place over the preschool years (Lalonde & Chandler, 2002; Osterhaus et al., 2016; Wellman & Liu, 2004). Yet aspects of task design, performance limitations, and pragmatic factors may also have contributed to the time lags documented (Oktay-Gür & Rakoczy, 2017; Rakoczy, Bergfeld, Schwarz, & Fizke, 2015).
Theory of Mind
2020, Encyclopedia of Infant and Early Childhood Development