Children's understanding of interpretation

doi:10.1016/S0732-118X(02)00007-7

New Ideas in Psychology

Volume 20, Issues 2–3, August–December 2002, Pages 163-198

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0732-118X(02)00007-7 Get rights and content

Abstract

The prevailing view in the study of children's developing theories of mind is that the 4-year-old's newfound understanding of false belief is the single developmental milestone marking entry into an adult “folk psychology.” We argue instead that there are at least two such watershed events. Children first develop a “copy theory” that equates the mind with a recording device capable of producing either faithful or flawed representations of reality and according to which mental states are determined entirely by the flow of information into the mind. Only later, in the early school years, do children come to appreciate, as do adults, that the mind itself can contribute to the content of mental states. This later-arriving “Interpretive Theory of Mind” allows an appreciation of the capacity for constructively interpreting and misinterpreting reality. The main finding from the six studies reported here is that children who otherwise demonstrate a clear understanding that beliefs can be false (and so deserve to be credited with a theory of mind), can nevertheless fail to appreciate even the most basic aspects of interpretation: that despite exposure to precisely the same information, two persons can still end up holding sharply different opinions about what is the self-same reality. What these studies reveal is that an interpretive theory of mind is different from, and later arriving than, an appreciation of the possibility of false belief, and contrary to competing claims, this interpretive theory actually makes its first appearance during, but not before, the early school years.

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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View full text

Children's understanding of interpretation

Abstract

Section snippets

Children's understanding of interpretation

False beliefs about false beliefs

Finding an alternative methodology

Study 1

Study 2

Study 3

Study 4

Study 5

Study 6

An overall test

General discussion

Acknowledgements

Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology

Cognition

Cognition

The development of person perception in childhood and adolescenceFrom behavioral consequences to psychological constructs to psychological comparisons

Child Development

Women's ways of knowing

An introduction to the principles of psychology

On the distinction between false belief understanding and subscribing to an interpretive theory of mind

Child Development

Relativism and the problem of epistemological loneliness

Human Development

Doubt and developing theories of mind

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

International Journal of Behavioral Development

Shifting toward an interpretive theory of mindFive- to seven-year-olds changing conceptions of mental life

The development of children's knowledge about the mindFrom cognitive connections to mental representations