Essays
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Two‐Systems View of Children's Theory‐of‐Mind Understanding - Low, Jason
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. -
Theory of Mind and Behavior - Brandone, Amanda C.
The capacity to understand and reason about the unobservable mental states (e.g., thoughts, desires, and beliefs) of oneself and others, known as theory of mind (ToM), is central to human social cognition. Multidisciplinary interest in ToM stems from its potentially unique human nature, the role it plays in our ability to engage in complex social interactions, and its impairment in psychiatric and developmental disorders, such as autism. Through more than 30 years of research, we have learned a great deal about how and when children come to reason about others in terms of their mental states. This essay reviews foundational research on the development of ToM reasoning during childhood; outlines cutting‐edge findings on the infant origins and neural correlates of ToM; and finally discusses key issues for future research, including reconciling infant competence with evidence of protracted conceptual development in early childhood, expanding our neuroscientific understanding of ToM and its development, and shedding light on the use and individual variability of ToM in everyday life. Pursuing these goals will address important theoretical questions and provide critical new insight into the origins, development, neural basis, and social and behavioral consequences of ToM. -
Theory of Mind - Wellman, Henry
Humans are a social species. We not only live socially, but also think socially, accumulating myriad thoughts and knowledge about our social world. A hallmark of this human social cognition is an everyday theory of mind––our ordinary human understanding that persons (self and others) have internal mental states––desires, beliefs, feelings, hopes—that crucially shape their actions and lives. I review classic and current knowledge on the nature and importance of theory of mind. Theory of mind is achieved and changes over human development; so, I emphasize that we must understand its development. Fortunately, development of this everyday theory of mind is an intriguing story in its own right, and a great portion of the research on theory of mind is developmental research with typical and atypical infants and children. -
The Reading Brain: The Canary in the Mind - Wolf, Maryanne
The development of the seemingly simple cultural invention of reading alters the brain of each literate individual, propulses the intellectual development of the species, and provides human beings with a history of past knowledge as a foundation for future thought. Understanding how this happened in the species provides unexpected lessons for how children learn, how teachers teach, and how the brain learns anything new. Understanding the intrinsic plasticity of the reading brain circuit provides a cautionary tale for examining the cognitive impact of different media on how we read and how we think. -
Resource Limitations in Visual Cognition - Liverence, Brandon M.
Visual attention and visual working memory are two of the core resources that support visual perception. Foundational research has demonstrated that these resources are highly limited, but an active debate concerns exactly how they are limited. While many classic studies suggested that these resources are fundamentally discrete, with fixed capacity of 3–4 objects maximum, a number of recent studies have argued that these resources are fundamentally continuous, with no fixed upper‐bound to the number of objects that can be attended or remembered. This entry reviews the state of this debate, and shows how convergence between these (often separate) areas of research is a major emerging trend in the field of visual cognition.