Theory of mind finds its Piagetian perspective: why alternative naming comes with understanding belief
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:
Generalising these definitions in representational terms we might say that a difference in perspective occurs whenever there is a(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).
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.
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