The self and action in theory of mind research
Introduction
Children’s developing ability to attribute mental states to themselves and others has been the focus of a large body of research in the past 20 years (see Flavell, 1999; Lee & Homer, 1999; Wellman, 2002 for reviews). Around the age of four years, children begin to use an intuitive belief-desire psychology for action prediction and explanation. While a mentalistic understanding of agents develops around the age of 18 months (Gergely & Csibra, 2003), and explicit attribution of desires begins around the age of two years, belief attribution poses a conceptual problem for children below the age of about four years. Belief understanding requires a representational understanding of the mind (Perner, 1991). Beliefs can differ from reality and thus misrepresent reality. Therefore, the case of false belief has become a diagnostic test for children’s conception of the mind as representational (Wimmer & Perner, 1983). Around the age of four years, children begin to differentiate beliefs from reality, and understand that beliefs (not states of the world) guide action. The appearance-reality differentiation, the distinction between pretense and belief, advanced (Level 2) visual perspective taking abilities, as well as an understanding of the seeing-knowing relation develop in the same age range as belief understanding. These developmental changes occur in close conjunction, supporting the view that a coherent body of conceptual knowledge guides four-year-old children’s psychological reasoning.
Section snippets
The self
Within the theory of mind framework, development of the self has been studied under the aspect of the relation between knowledge about one’s own mind and knowledge about others’ minds. Intuitively, it appears that we have immediate access to our own mental states whereas we gain access to others’ minds through inferential processes. Consistent with this notion, simulation theory (Harris, 1992) assumes a special way of accessing one’s own mental states. This view is inconsistent, however, with a
The self and action control
At about the same age as children gain insight into their own and others‘ representational mental states, they also show marked improvement on a variety of measures of action control (executive function tasks). A developmental relation between children’s mastery of theory of mind tasks and their improvement on executive function tasks has been demonstrated in normal development (Carlson, Moses, & Hix, 1998; Perner, Lang, & Kloo, 2002; Russell, Mauthner, Sharpe, & Tidswell, 1991; see Perner &
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