Jove
Visualize
Contact Us
JoVE
x logofacebook logolinkedin logoyoutube logo
ABOUT JoVE
OverviewLeadershipBlogJoVE Help Center
AUTHORS
Publishing ProcessEditorial BoardScope & PoliciesPeer ReviewFAQSubmit
LIBRARIANS
TestimonialsSubscriptionsAccessResourcesLibrary Advisory BoardFAQ
RESEARCH
JoVE JournalMethods CollectionsJoVE Encyclopedia of ExperimentsArchive
EDUCATION
JoVE CoreJoVE BusinessJoVE Science EducationJoVE Lab ManualFaculty Resource CenterFaculty Site
Terms & Conditions of Use
Privacy Policy
Policies

Related Experiment Videos

Children's mental representation of referential relations

I A Apperly1, E J Robinson

  • 1School of Psychology, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, UK.

Cognition
|October 17, 1998
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Related Concept Videos

You might also read

Related Articles

Articles linked to this work by shared authors, journal, and citation graph.

Sort by
Same author

How does cognitive behavior therapy for dissociative seizures work? A mediation analysis of the CODES trial.

Psychological medicine·2024
Same author

Young children spontaneously invent three different types of associative tool use behaviour.

Evolutionary human sciences·2023
Same author

Moderators of cognitive behavioural therapy treatment effects and predictors of outcome in the CODES randomised controlled trial for adults with dissociative seizures.

Journal of psychosomatic research·2022
Same author

Address Read before the Northern Ohio Dental Association: At Put in Bay, May 2, 1871.

The Dental register·2021
Same author

Changes in newspaper coverage of mental illness from 2008 to 2016 in England.

Epidemiology and psychiatric sciences·2018
Same author

Mediators of increased self-harm and suicidal ideation in sexual minority youth: a longitudinal study.

Psychological medicine·2018

Children

Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Development
  • Theory of Mind
  • Mental Representation

Background:

  • Standard theory of mind tasks assess children's understanding of others' mental states.
  • Previous research assumes a unified representational ability underlies performance on these tasks.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate a discrepancy in children's performance on tasks seemingly requiring similar representational abilities.
  • To explore the developmental trajectory of mental representations of referential relations.

Main Methods:

  • Four- to six-year-old children participated in two tasks involving a protagonist with partial object information.
  • Experiment 1 assessed judgments about the protagonist's knowledge of object descriptions (X and Y).
  • Experiment 2 examined predictions of the protagonist's search behavior for an object.

Related Experiment Videos

Main Results:

  • Children correctly identified that the protagonist did not know X was Y, but incorrectly believed he knew Y was in the box.
  • Children made incorrect predictions about the protagonist's search location, indicating a problem beyond linguistic interpretation.
  • Performance differed significantly between the two tasks, revealing a nuanced understanding of representational knowledge.

Conclusions:

  • Success on standard theory of mind tasks may rely on a more fundamental representing ability than previously theorized.
  • Children's mental representation of referential relations undergoes significant developmental changes.
  • A distinction exists between understanding object identity and object existence based on partial information.