Theory of mind

Another important aspect of early cognitive development is a capacity that we take for granted. And yet it is a distinctive human ability whose origins and developmental course prove difficult to uncover. This is the phenomenon of theory of mind. Theory of mind refers to the understanding that people (oneself and others) have mental states (thoughts, beliefs, feelings, desires) and that these mental states influence our behaviour. It seems pretty obvious to you and me that we have minds. But how do we know? We can never see or touch a mind; we cannot directly observe mental processes in action. The ‘mind’ is quite an abstract concept. Indeed, perhaps you are studying psychology because you would like to find out more about this intriguing but elusive possession. Preschoolers cannot read psychology textbooks. So how do they find out about minds? Do young children appreciate that they and other people are thinking beings? Do they understand that what a person thinks or believes can affect what she does? Imagine his scenario, put to young children by the developmental psychologists Wimmer and Perner (1983): Maxi has a bar of chocolate, which he puts in the green cupboard. He goes out to play, and while he is out his mother moves the chocolate to the blue cupboard. Then Maxi comes in, and he wants to eat some chocolate. Where will he look for the chocolate? Would you expect Maxi to look in the green cupboard, where he last saw his chocolate and where he believes it still to be? Or would he look in the blue cupboard, where you know the chocolate is now? If you have a theory of mind – so you understand that people act according to what they believe to be the case – then you will answer that Maxi will look in the green cupboard. Interestingly, Wimmer and Perner found that children under the age of about five or six often answer, with great confidence, that Maxi will look in the blue cupboard. So preschoolers seem to be dominated by their own knowledge and find it difficult to grasp that Maxi would be guided by his own f lse belief. Slightly older children are more likely to take account of Maxi’s mental state. They know that he is wrong, but they can understand that, on the evidence available to him, he is likely to think that his chocolate should be where he stashed it. The researchers also checked whether the preschool participants could remember where this was: they could, yet they still insisted that Maxi would look in the new location. This experiment led to a great deal of discussion about young children’s grasp of mental processes. It seemed to indicate that preschoolers have serious difficulties understanding that people’s behaviour is an outcome of their mental states (in this case, their beliefs). Because the difficulty could not be explained merely as a problem with memory, Wimmer and Perner suggested that some special cognitive skill must be emerging around the period between four and six years of age: the child is developing a theory of mind. This topic excited a great deal of subsequent research. Other investig tors showed that, if the task is simplified a little, four-year- olds demonstrated understanding of false belief (Baron- Cohen, Leslie & Frith, 1985). In non-experimental settings (such as everyday conversations), others found that even younger children do make spontaneous and contextually appropriate references to mental states, which suggests that they do have some early awareness of the relevance of mind to human behaviour (Flavell, 2000). For example, Dunn (1999) reports that a three-year-old participant turned to her four-month-old sibling and said: ‘You don’t remember Judy. I do!’ This brief remark indicates not only that the child had some understanding of the phenomenon of memory but also that she could simultaneously (and accurately) appraise the relevant contents of her own mind and that of her baby sister. The emergence of theory of mind raises some fascinating questions and has provoked a lot of ingenious research (see Smith, Cowie & Blades, 2003). For our purposes, it is enough to state that important developments in children’s understanding of mental states seem to occur at around age three to four years. Given the complexity of the concept of mind, this is remarkably early. Yet, given the centrality of mind to our everyday interactions with other people, it is clearly an essential capacity, and it would be hard to imagine life without it. In fact, there are people who do have particular difficulty with theory of mind tasks – children with autism (Baron-Cohen et al., 1985). Interestingly, one of the defining characteristics of people with autism is that they have severe difficulties communicating and interacting with other people. Could this be because they lack a theory of mind? The nature of children’s theory of mind, and its implications for other aspects of their reasoning and social behaviour, are central topics in contemporary developmental psychology. [autism early onset, biologically caused disorder of communication and social interaction, usually accompanied by obsessive and stereotyped behaviour and intellectual disability]