D&M Ch 10 - Childhood Development

Ch 10 - Childhood Development

Development of Theory of Mind

Theory of Mind (ToM) is the ability to "attribute mental states to ourselves and to other people".

Includes:

• understanding mental states and beliefs (false beliefs, emotions, desires)
• understanding others may have different beliefs
• understanding what it means "to know" and "to forget"

These abilities let us predict the behaviors of others. Animals seem able to predict behavior...ToM or pattern recognition??

How to Measure the Progress of ToM

Key factor: ability to demonstrate an understanding that someone can have a false belief that does not match reality. This reflects understanding that an understanding can be different from actual state of the world.

False belief experiment: Max and his truck, relocated by his mother. Results were consistent across multiple beliefs, countries, etc. Tried this on my kids -- Mira as a 4 year old, no problem. Stella as a 6 year old, no problem either.

Another example -- if you know your competitor will always choose the prize you want the most, you might choose to mislead him/her. General notion: "at 3 years of age, children do not realize that other people can hold a false belief, whereas at around the age of 4, children begin to understand that people's beliefs do not necessarily reflect reality"

Key factor: appearance versus reality - candle shaped like a bird, is it a candle or a bird?

Theory of mind seems to develop coherently and as a system -- once they do well on one ToM task, they tend to do well on many others.

Fantasy play -- telling reality from imagination. Children seem able to tell the difference, but to still feel afraid of things they know are imaginary. Some children even thought that perhaps something they imagined might be able to become real. Area of future research.

Theories of ToM Development

Children seem to develop in spurts -- to go from no theory of mind to strong theory of mind in six months. Pop! Theories about development focus on one of two approaches -- a special mechanism or type of development ("modular"), or an example of more general development.

If modular theory -- a specific neurocognitive system is responsible. Innate structure matures from birth through childhood. But if innate, why can't children pass it before they are 3.5 yrs old? Some arguments are that we just can't measure it well before then, and that even infants show some awareness of ToM.

If general theory -- neuro systems support many abilities, for example overall executive functioning skills (inhibit irrelevant thoughts, work with multiple thoughts at once) might be responsible for ToM tasks. Notion is that children must consciously inhibit interfering memories so as to not be deceived. Seem to correlate ToM with executive control -- but causality, if any, is not clear. May be functional interdependence.

Development of Metamemory

We know that memory monitoring and feeling of knowing is a real thing in humans -- what about in non-humans? And when do children begin to develop what we can clearly measure in adults?

Metacognition in Nonhumans

How about chimps? Commonly thought of as having "mental age of a 3-year-old". Lack of verbalization is a challenge. Study design is key.

Josep Call -- if an animal knows it does not know, it would seek information. So information seeking is used as a metacognitive indicator. Ex: hide a treat in one of two spots. Chimp will look to see which spot the treat is in. Dogs will just go for the treat.

Smith/Shields/Washburn have shown that primates and dolphins have an 'uncertainty' response. Offered an 'opt out' choice when a task is too difficult (no reward, and no punishment either).

Counter: does complex conditioning or innate tendency explain this instead? Hampton studied opt-out/uncertainty in monkeys, and showed that monkeys chose among difficult tasks/high reward and easier/low reward effectively -- they knew when they knew. Can't just be conditioning because his design relied on memory.

Overall conclusion: animals have some metacognition abilities.

Development of memory monitoring in children

Global judgments
Asked to make a a memory judgment, children tend to be overconfident. Practice didn't eliminate their overconfidence either. Children may not be good at monitoring their performance? No, this was ruled out. Wishful thinking? Inability to differentiate what you wish for and what you expect. But this is not proven, because overconfidence often persists even when predicting the performance of others.

Overconfidence may be adaptive -- encourages ambitious trials and learning experiences.

Item by Item Judgments of Learning
Less research on this topic. We believe that adults use inference to make JOLs -- ease of learning, study trials. Children were tested to see if they are sensitive to these cues. Children seemed to respond to the ease of learning and study trials heuristics, just like adults.

How about delayed JOLs? Younger kids given fewer. Children still had better than chance accuracy and higher accuracy on delayed JOLs than for immediate JOLs, and younger children did as well as older children in delayed JOLs.

Conclusion: Children have remarkably adult-like metacognition. Strategic use of study time does improve with age.

FOK in Children
Study -- give definition of words, until they failed to define 35 of them. Afterward, they made an FOK for the words and a multiple choice for each. FOK accuracy improved with age in one study but did not improve in many others.

Strategy Use

Learning a list of words -- most successful if you use a strategy, like a mnemonic. Researchers have investigated if children develop in their use of strategy.

Knowledge about strategies -- do children know about effective ways to promote their learning? Kreutzer et al did a series of interviews to gauge knowledge of strategy, memory, and learning. Children at all ages had some intuitions about these things, although older children articulated better, and tended to offer better strategies.

Effectiveness of Strategy Use

Experiment: list of words, rehearsed. Tendency for early words and most recent words to be best-remembered. Younger children may not spontaneously use the best strategies in these cases. But if instructed to use effective strategies, they are capable of doing so and benefit from them -- if they have a production deficiency. Some children have a utilization deficiency, in which they are trained to use a strategy but don't execute it well.

Borkowski et al: "When a child possesses a number of strategies together with knowledge about their various uses, he or she is able to make an informed judgment about strategy deployment".

Metacognitive model of strategy discovery: application of heuristics.
Associative model of strategy discovery: discoveries through doing tasks, actions, assessing outcomes

Hybrid of metacognitive and associative strategy discovery seems to lead to best results.

Theme: "mutual influence between metacognitive and cognitive processes that is responsible for how we think and behave when faced with many different tasks"

relationship between ToM and Metamemory

ToM and Metamemory do not develop in lockstep. Each is multidimensional and the relationship is complex. ToM investigate knowledge about mental states, metamemory researchers investigate knowledge and processes relevant to task performance. ToM researchers tend to investigate younger children, metamemory researchers focus on 6 and up.

Lockl/Schneider - study at 3, 4, and 5, combining both ToM and Metamemory experiments. Kids' performance correlated throughout the study -- early success and late success. Language is an essential tool -- but even with corrections for language acquisition, the correlations continued. Early theory-of-mind is a precursor of metamemory. Representation seems to be a crucial step.