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Related Experiment Videos

Six-year-olds' difficulties handling intensional contexts.

Sarah Hulme1, Peter Mitchell, David Wood

  • 1School of Psychology, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham, NG7 2RD, UK.

Cognition
|February 19, 2003
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

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Six-year-old children struggle with intensional contexts, often answering based on their own knowledge rather than a character's belief. This research explores their understanding of mental states in these complex scenarios.

Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Development
  • Developmental Psychology
  • Philosophy of Mind

Background:

  • Children's difficulties with intensional contexts persist even after passing false belief tasks.
  • Some theories attribute these challenges to linguistic factors rather than representational limitations.
  • Understanding how children process beliefs in non-literal contexts is crucial for cognitive development research.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate if 6-year-old children can handle intensional contexts without explicit verbal belief reporting.
  • To determine if children's responses in intensional contexts reflect their own knowledge or the protagonist's.
  • To differentiate between linguistic and representational accounts of children's difficulties with intensionality.

Main Methods:

Related Experiment Videos

  • Children answered questions within an intensional context by selecting a picture for a thought bubble.
  • Performance was compared to false belief task performance and own knowledge responses.
  • Methodological controls were implemented to rule out alternative explanations (procedural factors, default answering, pictorial salience).

    • Main Results:

    • Children consistently answered according to their own knowledge in the intensional context, even with pictorial responses.
    • This pattern persisted despite children correctly answering false belief and knowledge-state questions.
    • Further experiments confirmed that this was not a default response or due to visual cues.

    Conclusions:

    • Children's difficulties in intensional contexts may stem from how they attribute mental states, not just linguistic competence.
    • Findings challenge purely linguistic explanations and offer insights into the simulation-theory debate.
    • The study highlights the complexity of children's developing theory of mind in nuanced contexts.