E-Thesis 8 views 2 downloads
Realism and representation in children's early conception of mind / Rebecca Anne Saltmarsh
Abstract
The aim of this thesis was to investigate why young children fail false belief tests and to assess whether this failure could be caused by their propensity to attend to current reality. In the first experiment (2:1) we found that inducing objective self-awareness in the child by allowing her to perf...
| Published: |
Swansea
1995
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| Institution: | Swansea University |
| Degree level: | Doctoral |
| Degree name: | Ph.D |
| URI: | https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa67987 |
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| Abstract: |
The aim of this thesis was to investigate why young children fail false belief tests and to assess whether this failure could be caused by their propensity to attend to current reality. In the first experiment (2:1) we found that inducing objective self-awareness in the child by allowing her to perform a deceptive box, false belief test in the presence of a mirror or a video monitor had no effect on her subsequent ability to acknowledge her prior false belief. In experiments 2:2, 2:3 and 3:1 we filmed the child carrying out the test and then replay the initial part of the film back to her. Under this condition, the child was more likely to later acknowledge her false belief than when tested on a standard task. However, in experiments 2:2 and 3:1 this effect did not reach significance. In addition, we found (experiment 3:1) that if we replayed the entire video to the child (so that she actually heard her earlier self commenting on her belief ), an even greater proportion of the children responded to the test question with their false belief. Experiments 3:2 and 3:3 confirmed that under this completeplayback condition, children were not simply repeating what they had heard on the video, butwere making genuine belief-based judgements. In our second series of experiments we replicated Wimmer and Hartl's (1991) finding that children are more likely to give a correct response in the state change procedure than in the deceptive box procedure. In experiment 4:1 we discovered that this was true, not only for clinically normal preschool children, but also for children with autism. Wimmer and Hartl suggested that children gave the correct response by referring to the earlier situation rather thanks to their prior belief. However, we found (experiment 5:1 and 5:2) that even when children were asked to identify a false belief within the state change procedure, children were significantly more likely to succeed than they were on a standard task. In addition, we discovered that on the true belief state change task, children could not have been giving the correct responsesimply by glossing the test question to one concerning reality. We demonstrated this in experiment 5:3 when on our deceptive box two contents task the majority of children referred to current (rather than prior) reality. In our final experiment (experiment 6:1) we found that facilitation within the state change task could not have been caused by its deceptive nature. We discuss our findings within the framework of the reality masking hypothesis which suggests that current reality is more salient to young children than are beliefs. As such, young children are biased to attend to the world around them. Therefore although preschool children do understand something of the representational nature of beliefs, this knowledge is masked by their inclination to attend to reality. On a deceptive box task this means they will concentrate on the present content of the box and not on their earlier belief. However, if that belief is made more prominent, children will find it easier to divert their attention away from current reality. We suggest that for children, in whom the reality bias is strong, the belief can only be made to be more salient than reality if it is associated with a physical reality (as happens in the video complete playback condition and the state change procedure). However, in those children in whom the bias is diminishing, simply providing them with a stimulus that draws their attention away from the external world towards their mental realm might be sufficient to allow them to acknowledge a false belief. |
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| Item Description: |
OCR scan of original print thesis. |
| Keywords: |
Children, realism, mind, self-awareness |
| College: |
Faculty of Medicine, Health and Life Sciences |