Journal
DEVELOPMENTAL REVIEW
Volume 34, Issue 3, Pages 265-293Publisher
ACADEMIC PRESS INC ELSEVIER SCIENCE
DOI: 10.1016/j.dr.2014.04.001
Keywords
Theory of mind; Infancy; Mentalism; Minimalism; Implicit; Explicit
Categories
Ask authors/readers for more resources
This paper provides a minimalist framework for understanding the development of children's theory of mind (ToM). First, I provide a critical analysis of rich interpretations of TOM tasks tapping infants' understanding of perception, goals, intentions, and false beliefs. I argue that the current consensus that infants understand mental states is premature, and instead, that excellent statistical learning skills and attention to human faces and motion enable infants' very good performance, and reflect an implicit understanding of behavior. Children subsequently develop an explicit understanding of mental states through talk from parents and siblings, their developing language abilities, and their developing distinction between self and other. The paper also examines corollary theories such as the idea that there are subsystems of a theory of mind (ToM), that infants use rules on false belief tasks, that minimalist theory is post hoc, and that parallel onset of success on different ToM tasks indicates an underlying ToM. The paper concludes by considering previous arguments against minimalist interpretations of infant performance. (c) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available