Trends in Cognitive Sciences
Understanding children's and adults' limitations in mental state reasoning
Section snippets
Over-estimating what others know and what we ourselves once knew
Do children suffer from the curse of knowledge? In one study to explore this, three-, four-, and five-year-olds were presented with two sets of toys: one described as being familiar to the experimenter's puppet friend, Percy, and one described as being unfamiliar to Percy. The children were told that each toy had an object inside and were asked to judge whether Percy would know what was inside. The key manipulation was that sometimes the children were shown the toys’ contents, and sometimes
Difficulties in false-belief reasoning
Standard false-belief tasks are cursed. In these tasks, the children always know the outcome – either that Sally's ball has been moved to the box or that the candy has been replaced with pencils. Even adults, who undoubtedly have the ability to reason about false beliefs, still experience difficulty on such tasks when they know the outcome of the event. In a four-box version of the ‘Sally-Ann’ task, participants reported the probability that the protagonist would look in each of four possible
Difficulties in perspective-taking
Preschool children are often said to be ‘egocentric’ – they view the world entirely from their own point of view. One prominent area of research on egocentrism has focused on children's communication. For example, in the classic experiment demonstrating egocentric speech [28], two children are seated across from each other with a screen placed so they cannot see one another. One child is designated the speaker, the other the listener. The speaker's job is to communicate to the listener what
What is the nature and origin of the curse of knowledge?
When assessing the knowledge of another person, an adaptive and useful heuristic is to default to one's own knowledge 29, 30, whether it is through a ‘simulation’ process involving imagining oneself as the other person (e.g. [31]) or through a more direct projection of one's own knowledge [30]. If you are asked to predict whether someone will know the capital of France, for instance, the best, and often only, way to do so is to appeal to one's own knowledge state. But when another person's
Conclusions
We propose that the curse of knowledge account provides a unified framework for conceptualizing mental state reasoning throughout development. We suggest that younger children's heightened susceptibility to the curse of knowledge explains their tendencies to overestimate what others know, their proclivity to claim they ‘knew it all along’, their perspective-taking limitations, and their difficulties in reasoning about false beliefs. Similarly, we propose that several adult biases in social
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to David Armor, Geoff Cohen, Marcia Johnson, Frank Keil, Brian Scholl, Karen Wynn, the anonymous reviewers, and all of the members of the Language and Cognition Laboratory at Yale University for their helpful comments on earlier drafts.
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