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Children’s understanding of the interpretive nature of the mind

University of British Columbia

Six studies were conducted to investigate young children's earliest insights into the interpretive nature of knowing, or the formation of what has been called an "Interpretive Theory of Mind." This insight was operationalized as the ability to recognize that two persons exposed to precisely the same information can, nonetheless, end up holding sharply different opinions about what is the self-same reality. All of the studies made use of a set of pictures fitted with covers such that most of the underlying picture was hidden, leaving only an ambiguous set of lines visible through a small viewing window. The key question asked concerned subjects' understanding that other persons who have not seen the full picture but only the restricted view, and who know nothing about the full contents of the picture, are all nevertheless free and able to hold different beliefs about what is depicted in this restricted view. An important feature of this procedure is that it can assess both subjects' understanding of simple false belief as well as their understanding of the interpretive possibilities that such stimuli afford. This feature was exploited to demonstrate that young persons who appreciate that beliefs can be false—an achievement that is commonly taken to mark the point of entry into a theory-like understanding of mental life—cannot always be counted on to also appreciate that different interpretations of the same stimulus are possible. By exploring children's reactions to inherently ambiguous stimuli that, by design, easily lend themselves to misinterpretation, it is possible to distinguish between a theory of mind that rests entirely on notions of false belief (i.e., one that views the mind as a recording device capable only of mistakes of ignorance), and a more complex appreciation of the mind's more active capacity for constructively interpreting—and so misinterpreting—reality. What these studies reveal is that an interpretive theory of mind is different from, and later arriving than, an appreciation of the possibility of false belief, and, contrary to competing claims, this interpretive theory actually makes its first appearance during, but not before, the early school years.

Thesis/Dissertation

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2009-03-30

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/6650

Psychology

University of British Columbia

UBCV

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