Seeing who sees: Contrastive access helps children reason about other minds Kathie Pham, Elizabeth Bonawitz, & Alison Gopnik {kathiepham, liz_b, gopnik}@berkely.edu University of California, Department of Psychology, 3210 Tolman Hall Berkeley, CA 94720 USA Abstract Does contrastive access help preschoolers succeed on traditional false-belief tasks? Three- and four-year-olds were presented with a modified version of the change-of-location story in which two characters are the focus of interest. In the contrastive access condition preschoolers’ observe that one character leaves the room while the other stays and witnesses the moving event; in the non-contrastive condition both characters leave the room and fail to observe the moving event. Despite having to track two different characters and their different knowledge states about the location of the toy, preschoolers were more likely to succeed on the task when the characters had contrasting access to the moving event. This result supports a previously unexplored qualitative prediction of the Goodman et al (2006) computational model of the false-belief task and also provides tentative support for the theory theory view of the false-belief transition. Keywords: Cognitive development; theory of mind; False- belief task; Contrastive learning. Theory theory of mind The ability to reason about other people’s mental states, such as their beliefs and desires, their fears and aspirations, is often referred to as theory of mind. Having a theory of mind allows us to construct others as mental beings: entities much grander than their physical attributes or their observable actions. One result of this understanding is that as adults, we are able to not only consider our own beliefs, but the beliefs of countless others—diverging beliefs about a single reality, beliefs that may be mistaken. Decades of research have suggested that three-year-olds tend to struggle with false-belief reasoning in a very specific way. Studies have shown that three-year-olds misinterpret minds systematically—when an agent’s beliefs and reality diverge, they predict actions of that agent to be consistent with the reality, rather than the false-belief (Wimmer & Pemer, 1983; Perner et al., 1987). One classic example that tests a child’s false-belief understanding is the change-of- location task (Wimmer & Perner, 1983). A child is read a story about a character (e.g.) Sally, who stores her toy and then leaves the room. While she is away, a mischievous character moves the toy. Sally then returns to look for her toy and the child is asked, “Where will Sally first go look for her toy?” Three-year-olds often say that Sally will look where the toy actually is, consistent with the true state of the world, rather than the location consistent with the agent’s false-belief. In contrast, older four-year-olds more often correctly answer that Sally will look in the place that the toy was initially left, successfully considering an agent’s beliefs (e.g. Baron-Cohen et al., 1985; Perner, Leekam, & Wimmer, 1987; Wimmer & Perner, 1983). Despite decades of research replicating this finding, there is much debate about how and when knowledge about other’s mental states develops, and in particular when children develop an understanding of false-belief. Some studies suggest that children go through a conceptual change around ages three to five—from systematically failing false- belief tasks to performing above chance (Wellman, Cross, & Watson, 2001). However, there have been compelling arguments for earlier developing theory of mind competence suggesting that as early as 10 to 15 months infants already have an awareness that actors act on the basis of their beliefs and false-beliefs (e.g., see Baillargeon, Scott, and He, 2010 for a review). It is not yet clear how to best interpret these infant “false- belief” findings nor how to reconcile or integrate them with the preschool ones. Regardless, something definite and important is happening in children’s theory-of-mind understandings in the preschool years, beyond earlier developments in infancy. There are likely to be contrasts between implicit predictive and explicit causal-explanatory knowledge. Furthermore, differences in false-belief understanding as measured in the preschool years predict several key childhood competences, such as how and how much children talk about people in everyday conversation, their engagement in pretense, their social interactional skills and consequently their interactions with and popularity with peers (Astington & Jenkins 1995; Lalonde & Chandler 1995; Watson et al. 1999). Furthermore, variability in preschool performance on theory of mind tasks overlaps with but is distinctively different from executive function and IQ (e.g., Carlson & Moses 2001). These findings are important for confirming theory of mind’s significance and relevance during the preschool years as indexed by preschool theory of mind tasks (especially as researched thus far for false-belief tasks). Though it is unclear what factors support success on looking-time measures in young infants, the research that will be presented here assumes a theory-like competence that, in particular, supports explanation (e.g. Gopnik & Wellman, 1992; Wellman & Liu, 2007). We take the idea that theory of mind is analogous to scientific theories, resulting in children’s distinctive patterns of predictions and interpretations of evidence, which is often referred to as the theory theory account of theory of mind development (e.g. Gopnik, 1993; Gopnik & Wellman, 1992; Perner, 1991). What a theory-like understanding of mind permits is conceptual change—theory revision in the face of new
['Kathie Pham', 'Elizabeth Bonawitz', 'Alison Gopnik']
Seeing who sees: Contrastive access helps children reason about other minds