Cognitive development: children's knowledge about the mind.

This chapter reviews theory and research on the development of children's knowledge about the mental world, focusing especially on work done during the past 15 years under the rubric of theory-of-mind development. The three principal approaches to explaining this development--theory theory, modular theory, and simulation theory--are described first. Next comes a description of infant precursors or protoforms of theory-of-mind knowledge in infancy, including a beginning awareness of the intentionality and goal-directedness of human actions. This discussion is followed by a summary of the postinfancy development of children's understanding of visual perception, attention, desires, emotions, intentions, beliefs, knowledge, pretense, and thinking. Briefly considered next are intracultural, intercultural, and interspecies differences in theory-of-mind development. The chapter then concludes with some guesses about the future of the field.

[1]  A. Lillard,et al.  Ethnopsychologies: Reply to Wellman (1998) and Gauvain (1998). , 1998 .

[2]  H. Wellman,et al.  Explaining human movements and actions: Children's understanding of the limits of psychological explanation , 1997, Cognition.

[3]  S. Boysen,et al.  Current issues and emerging theories in animal cognition. , 1999, Annual review of psychology.

[4]  J. Sullivan,et al.  The psychological underpinnings of democracy: A selective review of research on political tolerance, interpersonal trust, and social capital. , 1999, Annual review of psychology.

[5]  J. Flavell,et al.  Development of children's knowledge about unconsciousness. , 1999, Child development.

[6]  P. Harris.  The work of imagination , 1991 .

[7]  Dare A. Baldwin,et al.  Early referential understanding: Infants' ability to recognize referential acts for what they are. , 1993 .

[8]  B. H. Pillow.  Two Trends in the Development of Conceptual Perspective-taking: An Elaboration of the Passive-Active Hypothesis , 1995 .

[9]  J. Flavell.  Perspectives on perspective taking. , 1992 .

[10]  M Taylor,et al.  Conceptual perspective taking: children's ability to distinguish what they know from what they see. , 1988, Child development.

[11]  M. Gauvain.  Culture, development, and theory of mind: comment on Lillard (1998) , 1998, Psychological bulletin.

[12]  Peter K. Smith,et al.  Theories of Theories of Mind , 1996 .

[13]  Paul L. Harris,et al.  From Simulation to Folk Psychology: The Case for Development , 1992 .

[14]  E. Spelke,et al.  Infants' knowledge of object motion and human action. , 1995 .

[15]  P. Mitchell,et al.  Introduction to theory of mind: Children, autism and apes. , 1997 .

[16]  J. Flavell,et al.  The development of children's knowledge about inner speech. , 1997, Child development.

[17]  H. Wellman,et al.  Children Talk About the Mind , 1995 .

[18]  D. Povinelli,et al.  Specificity of gaze-following in young chimpanzees , 1997 .

[19]  H. Wellman,et al.  Preschoolers' understanding of others' mental attitudes towards pretend happenings , 1997 .

[20]  S. Baron-Cohen.  Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind , 1997 .

[21]  A. Meltzoff.  Foundations for developing a concept of self: The role of imitation in relating self to other and the value of social mirroring, social modeling, and self practice in infancy. , 1990 .

[22]  A. Leslie.  Mapping the mind: ToMM, ToBY, and Agency: Core architecture and domain specificity , 1994 .

[23]  R. Byrne,et al.  Toward the next generation in data quality: A new survey of primate tactical deception , 1988, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[24]  A. Gopnik,et al.  Natural theories of mind: Evolution, development and simulation of everyday mindreading , 2015 .

[25]  G. Ladd,et al.  Peer relationships and social competence during early and middle childhood. , 1999, Annual review of psychology.

[26]  A. Leslie.  Pretense and representation: The origins of "theory of mind." , 1987 .

[27]  M. Tomasello.  Joint attention as social cognition. , 1995 .

[28]  A. Gopnik,et al.  Early reasoning about desires: evidence from 14- and 18-month-olds. , 1997, Developmental psychology.

[29]  M Taylor,et al.  Children's understanding of knowledge acquisition: the tendency for children to report that they have always known what they have just learned. , 1994, Child development.

[30]  H. Wellman,et al.  Cognitive development: foundational theories of core domains. , 1992, Annual review of psychology.

[31]  M. Beeghly,et al.  Talking About Internal States: The Acquisition of an Explicit Theory of Mind , 1982 .

[32]  M. Chandler,et al.  On the Distinction between False Belief Understanding and Subscribing to an Interpretive Theory of Mind , 1996 .

[33]  J. Woolley.  The Fictional Mind: Young Children's Understanding of Imagination, Pretense, and Dreams. , 1995 .

[34]  M. Legerstee.  A review of the animate-inanimate distinction in infancy: Implications for models of social and cognitive knowing , 1992 .

[35]  A. Meltzoff.  Understanding the Intentions of Others: Re-Enactment of Intended Acts by 18-Month-Old Children. , 1995, Developmental psychology.

[36]  P. Harris,et al.  Belief‐Desire Reasoning among Baka Children: Evidence for a Universal Conception of Mind , 1991 .

[37]  P. Schwanenflugel,et al.  The Older Child's Theory of Mind , 1994 .

[38]  Marjorie Taylor,et al.  The relation between individual differences in fantasy and theory of mind. , 1997, Child development.

[39]  J. Flavell,et al.  Development of knowledge about the appearance-reality distinction. , 1986, Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development.

[40]  A. Gopnik,et al.  The theory theory. , 1994 .

[41]  K. Bartsch,et al.  Individual differences in children's developing theory of mind and implications for metacognition , 1996 .

[42]  B. H. Pillow,et al.  There's more to the picture than meets the eye: young children's difficulty understanding biased interpretation. , 1996, Child development.

[43]  G. Butterworth,et al.  What minds have in common is space : Spatial mechanisms serving joint visual attention in infancy , 1991 .

[44]  C. Zahn-Waxler,et al.  Development of concern for others. , 1992 .

[45]  A. Lillard,et al.  Young children's conceptualization of pretense: action or mental representational state? , 1993, Child development.

[46]  A. Gopnik,et al.  Words, thoughts, and theories , 1997 .

[47]  Dare A. Baldwin,et al.  Infants' contribution to the achievement of joint reference. , 1991, Child development.

[48]  H. Wellman,et al.  The mind's "I": children's conception of the mind as an active agent. , 1994, Child development.

[49]  Thomas R. Shultz,et al.  The development of the understanding of human behavior: From agency to intentionality. , 1988 .

[50]  C. Dweck,et al.  Implicit Theories and Their Role in Judgments and Reactions: A Word From Two Perspectives , 1995 .

[51]  Alison Gopnik,et al.  Children's understanding of representational change and its relation to the understanding of false belief and the appearance-reality distinction. , 1988 .

[52]  K. Howard,et al.  Individual psychotherapy outcome and process research: challenges leading to greater turmoil or a positive transition? , 1999, Annual review of psychology.

[53]  H. Wellman.  Culture, variation, and levels of analysis in folk psychologies: comment on Lillard (1998) , 1998, Psychological bulletin.

[54]  E. Bates.  Language and context: The acquisition of pragmatics , 1976 .

[55]  H. Wellman,et al.  Early understanding of emotion: Evidence from natural language , 1995 .

[56]  Josef Perner,et al.  Theory of mind is contagious - you catch it from your sibs , 1994 .

[57]  A. Baum,et al.  Health psychology: mapping biobehavioral contributions to health and illness. , 1999, Annual review of psychology.

[58]  M. Legerstee.  The role of person and object in eliciting early imitation. , 1991, Journal of experimental child psychology.

[59]  D. E. Montgomery.  Young children's theory of knowing: The development of a folk epistemology , 1992 .

[60]  A. Meltzoff,et al.  Imitation, Memory, and the Representation of Persons. , 1994, Infant behavior & development.

[61]  S. Harter.  The development of self-representations. , 1998 .

[62]  A. Lillard,et al.  Body or mind: children's categorizing of pretense. , 1996, Child development.

[63]  L. Moses,et al.  Young Children's Understanding of Belief Constraints on Intention. , 1993 .

[64]  J. Flavell,et al.  Young children's knowledge about thinking. , 1995, Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development.

[65]  Peter Carruthers,et al.  Theories of theories of mind: Frontmatter , 1996 .

[66]  J. Astington,et al.  Cognitive Factors and Family Structure Associated with Theory of Mind Development in Young Children. , 1996 .

[67]  L. Ross,et al.  Naive realism in everyday life: Implications for social conflict and misunderstanding. , 1996 .

[68]  Megan R. Gunnar,et al.  The effects of maternal positive, neutral and negative affective communications on infant responses to new toys , 1987 .

[69]  J. Perner.  Understanding the Representational Mind , 1993 .

[70]  A. Lillard,et al.  Ethnopsychologies: cultural variations in theories of mind. , 1998, Psychological bulletin.

[71]  T. Treat,et al.  Quantifying the information value of clinical assessments with signal detection theory. , 1999, Annual review of psychology.

[72]  D. Povinelli,et al.  What young chimpanzees know about seeing. , 2000, Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development.

[73]  S. Baron-Cohen,et al.  Understanding other minds : perspectives from autism , 1994 .

[74]  M. Anisfeld.  Neonatal imitation*1 , 1991 .

[75]  A. Gopnik,et al.  Conceptual coherence in the child's theory of mind: training children to understand belief. , 1996, Child development.

[76]  Daniela K. O'Neill,et al.  Two‐Year‐Old Children's Sensitivity to a Parent's Knowledge State When Making Requests , 1996 .

[77]  J. A. Fodor.  A theory of the child's theory of mind , 1992, Cognition.

[78]  J. Dunn.  The Beginnings of Social Understanding , 1988 .

[79]  Lynd Forguson.  Common Sense , 1989 .

[80]  W L Custer,et al.  A comparison of young children's understanding of contradictory representations in pretense, memory, and belief. , 1996, Child development.

[81]  H. Wimmer,et al.  Three-year-olds' difficulty with false belief: The case for a conceptual deficit , 1987 .

[82]  C. Moore.  Theories of mind in infancy , 1996 .

[83]  Marjorie Taylor.  Chapter 9 – A Theory of Mind Perspective on Social Cognitive Development , 1996 .

[84]  Charles A. Nelson,et al.  The recognition of facial expressions in the first two years of life: mechanisms of development. , 1987, Child development.

[85]  A. Gopnik,et al.  Children's understanding of representational change and its relation to the understanding of false belief and the appearance-reality distinction. , 1988, Child development.

[86]  C. Schult.  Intended actions and intentional states: Young children's understanding of the causes of human actions. , 1996 .

[87]  Richard S. J. Frackowiak,et al.  Other minds in the brain: a functional imaging study of “theory of mind” in story comprehension , 1995, Cognition.

[88]  C. Moore,et al.  Social Understanding at the End of the First Year of Life , 1994 .

[89]  L. Moses,et al.  The role of inhibitory processes in young children's difficulties with deception and false belief. , 1998, Child development.

[90]  R N Aslin,et al.  The language environment of the young infant: implications for early perceptual development. , 1989, Canadian journal of psychology.

[91]  Peter Carruthers,et al.  Theories of theories of mind: What is acquired – theory-theory versus simulation-theory , 1996 .

[92]  C. Nelson.  The recognition of facial expressions in the first two years of life: mechanisms of development. , 1987, Child development.