Developmental Accounts of Theory-of-Mind Acquisition: Achieving Clarity via Computational Cognitive Modeling
Year: 2006
Type: article
Abstract: People's ability to predict and explain the beliefs, desires and actions of others, often called their Theory of Mind (ToM) is an central component of cognition.There is ample experimental evidence suggesting a major developmental shift in children's ToM somewhere between the ages of three and five (Wellman, Cross & Watson 2001).These results are often interpreted in terms of children acquiring rich understanding of belief and its representational nature.Both of these descriptors are ambiguous and controversial.This makes evaluating the evidence of such a shift, and its implication about the knowledge and mechanisms underlying ToM more difficult.Computational cognitive models are precise by nature, and can help resolve many of these difficulties.We present Polyscheme/ToM, a computational model of human behavior in some important ToM tasks.It uses a domain-general mechanism for representing alternate states of affairs in order to represent the way other people view the world.We demonstrate that the model has several implications: 1) it is possible to succeed in false belief tasks without explicitly representing beliefs; 2) behavior in experiments purporting to show success in false-belieflike tasks at earlier ages require significantly simpler mechanisms than success in the traditional false-belief task, and 3) the shift from younger to older behavior in these tasks can be accounted for by small, but highly consequential changes in cognitive mechanisms.
Authors: Paul Bello, Nicholas Cassimatis
Language: English
Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2768857716