Two‐Systems View of Children's Theory‐of‐Mind Understanding
Title
Two‐Systems View of Children's Theory‐of‐Mind Understanding
Author
Low, Jason
Research Area
Cognition and Emotions
Topic
Cognitive Development
Abstract
Theory‐of‐mind research reveals a puzzling pattern of young children showing implicit “mindreading” success in indirect false‐belief tasks well before they can pass explicit tasks where they are asked to make direct predictions about the mistaken agent's belief or behavior. Relevant theorizing has either boosted indirect responses (e.g., eye movements) as showcasing infants' and young children's innate psychological reasoning system or scoffed at indirect responses as reflecting only a shallow causal understanding of behavior. This essay describes new theorizing suggesting that we have not one but two mindreading systems—an implicit efficient system (shared by infants, children, and adults) that supports spontaneous responses such as eye gazing and an explicit flexible system (constructed from age 4 onward) that supports direct verbal responses. This view has inspired cutting‐edge research documenting signature limits on the kinds of input that the efficient mindreading system processes. New research shows that the efficient system is set to help young children and adults minimally track facts relating to agents and objects, but not relations between agents and propositions. The flexible system—supporting understanding of belief as such—guides children's direct verbal inferences in a wide range of perspective‐taking situations that include ascribing how people interpret a particular object. Future research into the question of how human beings mindread in fast‐moving situations will need insight into whether there are systematic patterns of limits on implicit understanding that converge across age groups, multiple paradigms, and diverse populations.