Theory of mind finds its Piagetian perspective: why alternative naming comes with understanding belief

doi:10.1016/S0885-2014(02)00127-2

Cognitive Development

Volume 17, Issues 3–4, September–December 2002, Pages 1451-1472

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0885-2014(02)00127-2 Get rights and content

Abstract

In the last of a series of experiments 48 3–5-year old children were tested on an alternative naming game with “synonyms,” e.g., if puppet calls the depicted item a “rabbit” the child has to call it a “bunny,” or the child has to judge puppet’s performance when roles are reversed. The game was also played with categories (rabbit–animal), name/colour (rabbit–black), colour/colour (black–white), and part/part (head–tail). The younger children (≤3.5 years) had severe problems with “synonyms” and categories (alternative names for the items, <10% correct), but not with names and colours, only colours, or only parts (>80% correct). Children’s increasing success with age on the alternative names tasks was closely paralleled (.53≤r≤.72) by their mastery of the false belief task in which they had to predict that a mistaken story character would look for a desired object in the wrong location. For explaining the synchrony between alternative naming and understanding false belief we draw on the Piagetian idea that children come to represent perspective at some point in their development. To apply this idea to the alternative naming game we draw on the philosophical discussion about sortals (terms that specify what sort of object something is) creating perspective differences.

Section snippets

A Piagetian preamble

Perspective played a central role for Piaget. Intellectual development consisted for him of overcoming one’s egocentrism by progressively decentering from how the world appears within ones point of view (perspective) to an objective, perspective-independent understanding. For instance, the young infant has to learn that objects do not go out of existence as they disappear from one’s view. Piaget and Inhelder (1948/1956) also investigated the child’s ability to represent (understand) visual

The original “synonyms” and false belief finding

Doherty (1994) and Doherty and Perner (1998) reported a surprisingly strong and robust developmental synchrony between children’s understanding of false belief and their ability to master a “synonyms” task. In the false belief task children are told about Max, who puts his chocolate bar into one location (A) and leaves. In his absence the chocolate is unexpectedly transferred to another location (B). He returns hungry for his chocolate. Children are asked where he will look for the chocolate.

Participants

Forty-eight children (29 boys, 19 girls) from four nursery schools in Salzburg, Austria participated in this study. Their ages ranged from 2.8 (2 years and 8 months) to 4.9 (mean age of 3.11, S.D.=7 months).

Design

Each child was tested in two sessions lasting roughly 15–20 min about 1 week apart. Each session consisted of four tasks, one standard false belief (FB) task and three SSD tasks. In one session the FB-task was administered before the SSD tasks and in the other session it was administered

Problems with Flavell’s and Markman’s “single identity” hypothesis

Although the data on the SSD-tasks clearly speak for the ME hypothesis, the question remains why ME should be developmentally related to failure of understanding visual perspective, the appearance–reality distinction and — in our case — false belief. Markman (1989) suggested that ME operates not at the level of linguistic labels but results from deeper principles of categorisation, namely that “children may believe that an object has one and only one identity — that it can be only one kind of

What is a perspective?

The Concise Oxford English Dictionary (Thompson, 1995) gives three relevant definitions:

(1) the art of drawing solid objects … so as to give the right impression of relative positions, size, etc.; (2) the apparent relation between visible objects as to position, distance, etc.; (3) a mental view of the relative importance of things (keep the right perspective).

Generalising these definitions in representational terms we might say that a difference in perspective occurs whenever there is a

Truth-incompatible perspectives

False beliefs (the chocolate is in location A) vis-à-vis reality (the chocolate is in B) are clear cases of a difference between truth-incompatible perspectives. That’s why these beliefs are called false. Similarly, that is why deceptive appearances, e.g., the piece of sponge appears to be a rock, are called deceptive, because the appearance misspecifies reality. In these cases it is clear that, e.g., Max’s mistaken statement, “the chocolate is in A,” and the child’s knowledge, “the chocolate

A constructivist definition of perspective

At the starting point we use a technical trick and assume all representations are representations of the same ‘thing:’ the logical universe (the set of all possible worlds). That means that any two representations with different content are different perspectives on the universe. For instance, both of us look at the same Dalmatian and one of us forms the thought, “it is a dog,” and the other, “it is perfectly spotted.” But there is no need, yet, to speak of different perspectives, if we can

Children’s mastery of perspective taking

We need to make an important distinction between different levels of “perspective taking:” switching perspectives (taking different perspectives at different times) and confronting perspectives (representing two perspectives simultaneously; understanding that there are different perspectives). In line with Clark’s (1997) many-perspectives view, which she contrasts with the one-perspective view ascribed to defenders of ME, children can switch conceptual perspectives more or less from the time

Mutual exclusivity — a problem of dual identity or perspective?

It is now tempting to conclude that the ability to represent differences in perspective frees children from the ME bias. This is not necessarily the case. For, from realising that I can conceive of a ‘thing’ under different sortals within different perspectives it does not follow that the ‘thing’ can have both identities. If this did follow, we would have to conclude from the fact that an object in the cupboard can be (mistakenly) conceived of as being in the drawer, that it must be possible

Back to Piaget

The ability required in the alternative naming tasks to acknowledge that something can be a rabbit and an animal at the same time should be a critical prerequisite for passing Inhelder and Piaget’s (1964) classic class inclusion test. For, asked about a group of three rabbits and two cats, whether there are more rabbits or more animals, one has to count the rabbits as rabbits and as animals. Our analysis claims that two perspectives are involved. Independent counts (How many rabbits? How many

A Piagetian epilogue

In our attempt to explain why alternative naming and understanding false belief are developmentally related we made use of several Piagetian ideas. (1) We used Piaget’s constructivist view of intellectual development for our definition of perspective. (2) We used Piaget’s and Inhelder’s notion that an understanding of perspective is acquired in early-to-middle childhood as a powerful tool to integrate different developments at the age of 4 years. (3) By differentiating between truth-compatible

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the staff and children of the Magistrat Kindergärten in Auwiesenstrasse 22-24 and 60, Neutorstrasse, Maxglan, the Pfarrkindergärten Herrnau, Nonntal, Parsch and the Gemeindekindergärten Radstadt and Ramsau for their participation in these studies. The project was financially supported by the Austrian Science Fund (Project P14495-SPR) and by a research grant from the Faculty of Natural Sciences, University of Salzburg, to Manuel Sprung.

References (49)

E.V. Clark
Conceptual perspective and lexical choice in acquisition
Cognition
(1997)
M. Doherty et al.
Metalinguistic awareness and theory of mind: Just two words for the same thing?
Cognitive Development
(1998)
J.H. Flavell et al.
Development of the appearance–reality distinction
Cognitive Psychology
(1983)
D. Frye et al.
Theory of mind and rule-based reasoning
Cognitive Development
(1995)
A.M. Leslie
Pretending and believing: Issues in the theory of ToMM
Cognition
(1994)
E.M. Markman et al.
Children’s use of mutual exclusivity to constrain the meanings of words
Cognitive Psychology
(1988)
J. Pascual-Leone
A mathematical model for the transition rule in Piaget’s developmental stages
Acta Psychologica
(1970)
J. Perner et al.
Development of theory of mind and executive control
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
(1999)
H. Wimmer et al.
Beliefs about beliefs: Representation and constraining function of wrong beliefs in young children’s understanding of deception
Cognition
(1983)
D. Zaitchik
When representations conflict with reality: The preschooler’s problem with false beliefs and “false” photographs
Cognition
(1990)

Carey, S. (1985). Conceptual change in childhood. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (A Bradofrd...

S. Carey et al.

Acquiring a single new word

Papers and Reports on Child Language Development

(1978)

S.M. Carlson et al.

Individual differences in inhibitory control and children’s theory of mind

Child Development

(2001)

Case, R. (1985). Intellectual development: Birth to adulthood. Orlando, FL: Academic...

Clements, W.A., Heider, A., Brooks, J., & Garnham, A. (1998). From synonyms to homonyms: Exploring the role of...

Dockrell, J. (1981). The child’s acquisition of unfamiliar words: An experimental study. Unpublished PhD thesis,...

Dockrell, J., & Campbell, R. (1986). Lexical acquisition strategies in the preschool child. In S. A. Kuczaj & M. D....

Doherty, M. (1994). Metalinguistic understanding and theory of mind. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Laboratory of...

M.J. Doherty

Children’s understanding of homonymy: Metalinguistic awareness and false belief

Journal of Child Language

(2000)

Doherty, M. (2001). Rejection of synonyms: A novel mutual exclusivity phenomenon. Unpublished manuscript, University of...

Flavell, J. H. (1988). The development of children’s knowledge about the mind: From cognitive connections to mental...

Forguson, L., & Gopnik, A. (1988). The ontogeny of common sense. In J. W. Astington, P. L. Harris, & D. R. Olson...

W.A. Garnham et al.

From synonyms to homonyms: Exploring the role of metarepresentation in language understanding

Developmental Science

(2000)

Harris, P. L., & Kavanaugh, R. D. (1993). Young children’s understanding of pretence. Society for Research in Child...

Cited by (119)

Maternal storytelling and reminiscing styles in relation to preschoolers’ perspective-taking abilities
2023, Cognitive Development
This study investigated mothers’ narrative styles across storytelling and reminiscing contexts in relation to preschoolers’ visual, socio-cognitive, and syntactic perspective-taking (PT) abilities. The sample consisted of 120 Turkish mothers and their 3- to 5-year-old children. Mother-child dyads were asked to retell a storybook and to reminisce about an event they experienced in the lab. Children’s visual PT, false belief understanding, syntactic PT, and vocabulary were assessed. The results indicated that mothers showed distinct narrative scaffolding styles in each context (storytelling: storyteller and story builder; reminiscing: elicitor, constructor, co-teller). Maternal storytelling styles, but not reminiscing styles were related to children’s age. Children of storytellers performed better in syntactic and visual PT tasks than children of story builders, and children of memory elicitors scored higher in visual PT tasks than children of co-tellers. The implications of these findings are discussed within our understanding of how mother-child discourse affects children’s socio-cognitive development.
Two birds in the hand: Concurrent and switching cognitive flexibility in preschoolers
2022, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
Cognitive flexibility, the ability to think of something in more than one way, has been studied in preschoolers from two different approaches. Within executive function research, most studies operationalize cognitive flexibility using sequential tasks in which children must think of a specific stimulus first in one way and then in another way (switching cognitive flexibility). In contrast, Piagetian multiplicative classification tasks also require cognitive flexibility by asking children to consider multiple dimensions of a single stimulus at the same time. Piagetian tasks are typically inductive and require abstraction skills. Although research with Piagetian tasks suggests that children are unable to consider multiple dimensions simultaneously until they reach the concrete operational stage, there is some evidence that preschoolers can coordinate two dimensions simultaneously in deductive tasks. In this study, we examined a deductive version of a matrix completion task in which preschoolers (N = 102) were asked to consider two dimensions of a given stimulus simultaneously. We show that 4- and 5-year-olds can succeed on this task and compare children’s performance on the matrix completion task with their performance on a widely used switching cognitive flexibility task, the Dimensional Change Card Sort. We discuss the implications of relating the two aspects of cognitive flexibility development.
Mindreading in conversation
2021, Cognition
How is human social intelligence engaged in the course of ordinary conversation? Standard models of conversation hold that language production and comprehension are guided by constant, rapid inferences about what other agents have in mind. However, the idea that mindreading is a pervasive feature of conversation is challenged by a large body of evidence suggesting that mental state attribution is slow and taxing, at least when it deals with propositional attitudes such as beliefs. Belief attributions involve contents that are decoupled from our own primary representation of reality; handling these contents has come to be seen as the signature of full-blown human mindreading. However, mindreading in cooperative communication does not necessarily demand decoupling. We argue for a theoretical and empirical turn towards “factive” forms of mentalizing here. In factive mentalizing, we monitor what others do or do not know, without generating decoupled representations. We propose a model of the representational, cognitive, and interactive components of factive mentalizing, a model that aims to explain efficient real-time monitoring of epistemic states in conversation. After laying out this account, we articulate a more limited set of conversational functions for nonfactive forms of mentalizing, including contexts of meta-linguistic repair, deception, and argumentation. We conclude with suggestions for further research into the roles played by factive versus nonfactive forms of mentalizing in conversation.
Mental files: Developmental integration of dual naming and theory of mind
2020, Developmental Review
Citation Excerpt :
The emergence of this ability around 4 years explains why these tasks are mastered at this age and strongly correlate. This has been demonstrated in eleven published experiments, total N = 513, 0.53 ≤ r ≤ 0.77; 0.29 ≤ rp ≤ 0.59 with age, or age and verbal IQ controlled (Diaz & Farrar, 2018; Doherty, 2000; Doherty & Perner, 1998; Gollek & Doherty, 2016; Perner et al., 2002; Wimmer & Doherty, 2011). A tempting alternative explanation of these findings is that the false belief test and alternative naming may pose similar executive demands on children.
We use mental files theory to provide an integral theory of children’s diverse dual naming problems and why these problems are overcome when children pass the false belief test. When an object is encountered under different appearances or given different verbal labels, two distinct representations (mental files) may be deployed for that single object. The resulting files refer to the same object but capture different perspectives on the object. Such coreferential files can thus be used to represent people’s differing perspectives (e.g., belief). Typically the existence of different files indicates the existence of two separate objects. To mark that only a single object is involved, coreferential files need to be linked. Development of the ability to link files provides a powerful developmental explanation for success on dual labelling and perspective tasks at the same age, around 4 years: processing identity statements, overcoming mutual exclusivity (accepting different labels for an object), visual perspective taking, and understanding differences of belief. Mental files also provide a new framework for understanding conceptual pacts and their relation to mutual exclusivity in children and adults.
What's in a Hub?—Representing Identity in Language and Mathematics
2020, Neuroscience
Hubs emerge in structural and resting state network analysis as areas highly connected to other parts of the brain and have been shown to respond to several task domains in functional imaging studies. A cognitive explanation for this multi-functionality is still wanting. We propose, that hubs subserve domain-general meta-cognitive functions, relevant to a variety of domain-specific networks and test this hypothesis for the example of processing explicit identity information. To isolate this meta-cognitive function from the processing of domain-specific context, we investigate the overlapping activations to linguistic identity processes (e.g. Mr. Dietrich is the dentist) on the one hand and numerical identity processes (e.g. do “3 × 8” and “36–12” give the same number) on the other hand. The main question was, whether these overlapping activations would fall within areas, consistently identified as hubs by network-based analyses. Indeed, the two contrasts showed significant conjunctions in the left inferior parietal lobe (IPL), precuneus (PC), and posterior cingulate. Accordingly, identity processing may well be one domain-general meta-cognitive function that hub-areas provide to domain-specific networks. For the parietal lobe we back up our hypothesis further with existing reports of activation peaks for other tasks that depend on identity processing, e.g., episodic recollection, theory of mind, and visual perspective taking.
Struggling with alternative descriptions: Impaired referential processing in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder
2019, Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders
Children and adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) show a tendency to preferentially rely on those referential descriptions that have previously been used by their conversational partner. However, such a tendency may become maladaptive in a situation of interaction with different partners who may introduce alternative lexical descriptions for the same referent.
Six-year-old children with ASD, as well as mental- and verbal-age-matched typically developing (TD) children moved items on a touch-screen following instructions by an experimenter. During the entrainment phase, the experimenter introduced lexical descriptions for all the items. Then, either the original experimenter or a new partner, depending on the condition, used alternative descriptions for some items and kept the same descriptions for others. Accuracy and time to locate items were collected.
Relative to TD children, children with ASD had more difficulty in recognizing and interpreting referential descriptions when another description has been previously used. Whether a new description was introduced by a new or the original experimenter had no effect in any group.
Referential processing in ASD is compromised by impaired ability to confront alternative conceptual perspectives. A potential executive source for these difficulties is discussed.

View all citing articles on Scopus

View full text

Theory of mind finds its Piagetian perspective: why alternative naming comes with understanding belief

Abstract

Section snippets

A Piagetian preamble

The original “synonyms” and false belief finding

Participants

Design

Problems with Flavell’s and Markman’s “single identity” hypothesis

What is a perspective?

Truth-incompatible perspectives

A constructivist definition of perspective

Children’s mastery of perspective taking

Mutual exclusivity — a problem of dual identity or perspective?

Back to Piaget

A Piagetian epilogue

Acknowledgements

Cognition

Cognitive Development

Cognitive Psychology

Cognitive Development

Cognition

Cognitive Psychology

Acta Psychologica

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

Cognition

Cognition

Acquiring a single new word

Papers and Reports on Child Language Development

Individual differences in inhibitory control and children’s theory of mind

Child Development

Children’s understanding of homonymy: Metalinguistic awareness and false belief

Journal of Child Language

From synonyms to homonyms: Exploring the role of metarepresentation in language understanding

Developmental Science