Conceptual coherence in the child's theory of mind: training children to understand belief.

@article{citeulike:460052, abstract = {Intuitive theories are defined as coherently interrelated systems of concepts that generate explanations and predictions in a particular domain of experience. 2 studies tested whether the child's theory of mind can be characterized as an intuitive theory. In Study 1, 3-year-old children who did not pass a false belief pretest were trained in 2 groups: (1) on the concept of belief, or (2) on the related concepts of desire and perception. Training took place over 2 weeks, with children given mental state tasks and receiving feedback according to their performance. Both training groups showed improved false belief performance on the posttest, compared to a control group trained on number conservation. This result is interpreted as demonstrating coherence in the child's theory of mind. In Study 2, these findings were repeated and expanded: training on belief as well as training on desire and perception resulted in improved performance on a variety of standard theory of mind posttests. Results are discussed with respect to competing theories of children's intuitive psychological knowledge.}, address = {University of California, Berkeley, USA. vps@psy.uq.edu.au}, author = {Slaughter, V. and Gopnik, A. }, citeulike-article-id = {460052}, issn = {0009-3920}, journal = {Child Dev}, keywords = {children, false-belief, tom}, month = {December}, number = {6}, pages = {2967--2988}, posted-at = {2008-02-11 22:31:21}, priority = {2}, title = {Conceptual coherence in the child's theory of mind: training children to understand belief.}, url = {http://view.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9071768}, volume = {67}, year = {1996} }

TY - JOUR ID - citeulike:460052 L3 - citeulike-article-id:460052 TI - Conceptual coherence in the child's theory of mind: training children to understand belief. JF - Child Dev VL - 67 IS - 6 SP - 2967 EP - 2988 AD - University of California, Berkeley, USA. vps@psy.uq.edu.au SN - 0009-3920 N2 - Intuitive theories are defined as coherently interrelated systems of concepts that generate explanations and predictions in a particular domain of experience. 2 studies tested whether the child's theory of mind can be characterized as an intuitive theory. In Study 1, 3-year-old children who did not pass a false belief pretest were trained in 2 groups: (1) on the concept of belief, or (2) on the related concepts of desire and perception. Training took place over 2 weeks, with children given mental state tasks and receiving feedback according to their performance. Both training groups showed improved false belief performance on the posttest, compared to a control group trained on number conservation. This result is interpreted as demonstrating coherence in the child's theory of mind. In Study 2, these findings were repeated and expanded: training on belief as well as training on desire and perception resulted in improved performance on a variety of standard theory of mind posttests. Results are discussed with respect to competing theories of children's intuitive psychological knowledge. KW - children KW - false-belief KW - tom AU - Slaughter, V AU - Gopnik, A PY - 1996/12// UR - http://view.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9071768 ER -