Social Cognition

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Social Cognition

• Psych. 414
• Prof. Jessica Sommerville

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Outline

• Folk psychology in adults
• Developing understandings of mind during the
  preschool years
• Precursors to a theory of mind
• Understandings of mind in older children

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Folk Psychology

• Common-sense understandings that people use in
  ordinary life
• Can be distinguished from a scientific
  understanding of mind
• Can be inaccurate
• Can be incomplete
• Shares characteristics with folk understanding in
  other domains (McCloskey, 1983)

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Folk Psychology

• Consists of commonly shared lay theories about
  the mind and its role in behavior
• Invokes mentalistic concepts such as belief,
  desire, knowledge, fear, pain, expectation,
  intention, understanding, dreaming, imagination,
  self-consciousness and so on to predict behavior
  (DAndrade, 1987)
• Theory? coherent set of beliefs about the mind

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Folk Psychology

• Has aspects that are universal
• All cultures distinguish between the real and
  imaginary
• Varies across cultures in terms of when and how
  folk psychology is deployed
• Implicit theories of motivation (Morris Peng,
  1994)
• Implicit theories of intelligence (Dweck, Chiu
  Hong, 1995)

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Having a Theory of Mind

• Theory of mind the ability to attribute
  mental states to self and others
• Entails understanding the mind as a
  representational system
• The mind doesnt simply reflect reality, it
  constructs reality

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Having a Theory of Mind

• What constitutes evidence for a theory of mind?
• litmus test Distinguishing between ones own
  true belief, and the awareness of someone elses
  different (false) belief (Dennett, 1978b)
• Involves metarepresentation

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False Belief (Wimmer Perner, 1983)

• Asked whether children have a representational
  theory of mind
• Looked at appreciation that a person may hold a
  belief that is incorrect
• Gave children tasks in which they were told a
  story and then had to predict a characters
  actions

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Maxi puts the chocolate in the blue cupboard.
Maxi goes out to play and his mother moves the
chocolate to the green cupboard.
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Where will Maxi look for the chocolate?
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Percentage of children who correctly predicted
the protagonists belief
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Appearance-Reality (Flavell, Flavell Green,
1983)

• A sophisticated understanding of the mind also
  entails appreciating that one can believe that an
  object has one identity, when it really has
  another.
• Showed objects with misleading appearances
• Four and 5-year-olds, but not 3-year-olds, could
  appreciate that the objects looked like one
  thing, but really were another thing

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Representational Change (Gopnik Astington,
1988)

• Do children appreciate that their beliefs can
  change over time as a function of experience?
• Showed children an object with deceptive contents
  and asked children to recount what they thought
  the object had initially contained

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Representational Change (Gopnik Astington,
1988)

• Four and 5-year-olds appreciated that their
  belief had changed
• Acknowledged that they had first thought the box
  contained Smarties, but now knew it contained
  pencils
• Three-year-olds updated their prior belief to
  match the current state of affairs
• Insisted that they had known all along that there
  were pencils in the box

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False Belief, Appearance-Reality and
Representational Change Performance

• Children are developing a principled
  understanding of how the mind works and its role
  in behavior between 3 and 5.
• Conceptual change Understand the mind as a
  representational system.

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Early theories of mind

• Two transitions before children acquire a
  representational theory of mind (Bartsch
  Wellman, 1995)
• Desire psychology (2-year-olds)
• Mentalistic but non-representational
  understanding of internal desire for external
  objects
• Desire-belief psychology (3-year-olds)
• Understand that beliefs exist, but not that they
  play a role in behavior

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Factors contributing to theory of mind development

• Executive function abilities
• Performance on ToM tasks related to IC
• Lack of IC in young children limits their ability
  to engage in mental state reasoning
• Family size
• Number of sibs related to ToM performance
• Language abilities and exposure
• ToM performance related to vocabulary
• ToM performance correlated with mothers use of
  mental state terms

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Recent challenges

• Conceptual change between 3 and 5?
• Older children and adults sometimes exhibit
  difficulty on theory of mind type tasks
• This weeks assignment
• Younger children sometimes succeed on simplified
  theory of mind tasks
• Clements and Perner (1994) I wonder where he is
  going to look?
• 3-year-olds look to the correct location
• Southgate et al (2007) 2.5-year-olds visually
  anticipate correct location

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Older Childrens Understanding of Mind

• Childrens understanding of mental activities
• Understanding of the stream of consciousness
  (Flavell, Green Flavell, 1993)
• Understanding of the selectiveness of attentional
  focus (Flavell, Green Flavell, 1995)
• Understanding of the limited natural of mental
  controllability (Flavell, Green Flavell, 1998)

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Stream of Consciousness
Mary is just sitting there waiting right now,
isnt she? How about her mind right now? Is she
having some thoughts and ideas, or is her mind
empty of thoughts and ideas?
5 of 3-year-olds, 20 of 4-year-olds, 55 of 6-
7-year-olds and 95 of adults attributed
thoughts and ideas during waiting trials
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Attentional focus

• Recognition that attention is limited and
  selective
• When do children recognize this?
• Recognizing people in a group photograph will
  character attend just to people or to frame of
  picture as well?
• 6- and 8-year-olds say she is only to people in
  photos 4-year-olds say she will attend to the
  frame as well

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Mental uncontrollability

• We dont always have control over what we think
  about
• Try not to think about a pink elephant
• When do children understand this?
• Trying not to think about a receiving a needle
  while waiting to get one
• 5- and 9-year-olds claim that protagonist can
  avoid thinking about the needle
• 13-year-olds recognize that the protagonist will
  automatically think about getting the shot