Toddlers' transitions on non-verbal false-belief tasks involving a novel location: A constructivist connectionist model (original) (raw)
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A model of toddlers' transitions on false-belief tasks using SDCC neural networks
Some argue that children learn a Theory of Mind (ToM), the understanding that others have mental states, at around 3.5 years. This is evidenced by their transition from failure to success on verbal false-belief tasks, when they begin to verbally predict an actress will search for a toy where she falsely believes it to be, rather than in its actual location. However, nonverbal measures have recently been used to show that children in their second year of life may already have some understanding of others' false beliefs. We present a Sibling-Descendant Cascade-Correlation neural-network model of one study that found 25month-old toddlers correctly anticipated an actress would search according to her false belief. Networks were trained on true-and false-belief search patterns, simulating toddlers' everyday experience with true and false beliefs, and then tested on nonverbal true-and false-belief tasks involving a novel location. Networks transitioned from incorrectly predicting true-belief searches in both true-and false-belief tasks to making correct predictions in both tasks. Our model thus (1) reproduced the transition that has been observed in older children and (2) generalized its learning to a novel location. The model can be used to refine our understanding of the transitions while again demonstrating the usefulness of SDCC as an algorithm for modeling cognitive development.
A computational developmental model of the implicit false belief task
Do children understand that others have mental representations, for instance, mental representations of an object's location? This understanding, known as a representational Theory of Mind (ToM) has typically been studied using false-belief (FB) tasks. Standard, verbal FB tasks test whether a child can use protagonists' beliefs to say that they will search for objects where they last saw them. Whereas children under 3.5 years typically fail the task and expect protagonists to search where objects are (expectation consistent with an omniscient ToM), older children expect protagonists to search where they last saw the objects (expectation consistent with a representational ToM). Recently, 15-month-olds were shown to succeed at a visual, implicit version of the task. We present a sibling-descendant cascade-correlation connectionist model that learns to succeed at an implicit FB task. When trained on twice as many true-as false-belief trials, our model reproduced the omniscient-torepresentational transition observed in explicit tasks. That is, networks first had expectations consistent with an omniscient ToM, and after further training had expectations consistent with a representational ToM. Thus, our model predicts that infants may also go through a transition on the implicit task, and suggests that this transition may be due in part to people holding more true than false beliefs.
False-belief understanding in infants
Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2010
At what age can children attribute false beliefs to others? Traditionally, investigations into this question have used elicited-response tasks in which children are asked a direct question about an agent's false belief. Results from these tasks indicate that the ability to attribute false beliefs does not emerge until about age 4. However, recent investigations using spontaneous-response tasks suggest that this ability is present much earlier. Here we review results from various spontaneous-response tasks that suggest that infants in the second year of life can already attribute false beliefs about location and identity as well as false perceptions. We also consider alternative interpretations that have been offered for these results, and discuss why elicited-response tasks are particularly difficult for young children.
2012
Recent research indicates that toddlers and infants succeed at various non-verbal spontaneousresponse false-belief tasks; here we asked whether toddlers would also succeed at verbal spontaneous-response false-belief tasks that imposed significant linguistic demands. 2.5-year-olds were tested using two novel tasks: a preferential-looking task in which children listened to a falsebelief story while looking at a picture book (with matching and non-matching pictures), and a violation-of-expectation task in which children watched an adult "Subject" answer (correctly or incorrectly) a standard false-belief question. Positive results were obtained with both tasks, despite their linguistic demands. These results (1) support the distinction between spontaneous-and elicited-response tasks by showing that toddlers succeed at verbal false-belief tasks that do not require them to answer direct questions about agents' false beliefs, (2) reinforce claims of robust continuity in early false-belief understanding as assessed by spontaneous-response tasks, and (3) provide researchers with new experimental tasks for exploring early false-belief understanding in neurotypical and autistic populations.
Cognition, 2021
Recent evidence suggests that young infants, as well as nonhuman apes, can anticipate others' behavior based on their false beliefs. While such behaviors have been proposed to be accounted by simple associations between agents, objects, and locations, human adults are undoubtedly endowed with sophisticated theory of mind abilities. For example, they can attribute mental contents about abstract or non-existing entities, or beliefs whose content is poorly specified. While such endeavors may be human specific, it is unclear whether the representational apparatus that allows for encoding such beliefs is present early in development. In four experiments we asked whether 15-month-old infants are able to attribute beliefs with underspecified content, update their content later, and maintain attributed beliefs that are unknown to be true or false. In Experiment 1, infants observed as an agent hid an object to an unspecified location. This location was later revealed in the absence or presence of the agent, and the object was then hidden again to an unspecified location. Then the infants could search for the object while the agent was away. Their search was biased to the revealed location (that could be represented as the potential content of the agent's belief when she had not witnessed the re-hiding), suggesting that they (1) first attributed an underspecified belief to the agent, (2) later updated the content of this belief, and (3) were primed by this content in their own action even though its validity was unknown. This priming effect was absent when the agent witnessed the re-hiding of the object, and thus her belief about the earlier location of the object did not have to be sustained. The same effect was observed when infants searched for a different toy (Experiment 2) or when an additional spatial transformation was introduced (Experiment 4), but not when the spatial transformation disrupted belief updating (Experiment 3). These data suggest that infants' representational apparatus is prepared to efficiently track other agents' beliefs online, encode underspecified beliefs and define their content later, possibly reflecting a crucial characteristic of mature theory of mind: using a metarepresentational format for ascribed beliefs. ☆ This paper is a part of special issue "Special Issue in Honour of Jacques Mehler, Cognition's founding editor".
2.5-YEAR-OLDS Succeed at a Verbal Anticipatory-Looking False-Belief Task
British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 2012
Recent research suggests that infants and toddlers succeed at a wide range of nonelicited-response false-belief tasks (i.e., tasks that do not require children to answer a direct question about a mistaken agent's likely behavior). However, one exception to this generalization comes from verbal anticipatory-looking tasks, which have produced inconsistent findings with toddlers. One possible explanation for these findings is that toddlers succeed when they correctly interpret the prompt as a self-addressed utterance (making the task a nonelicited-response task), but fail when they mistakenly interpret the prompt as a direct question (making the task an elicited-response task). Here, 2.5-year-old toddlers were tested in a verbal anticipatory-looking task that was designed to help them interpret the anticipatory prompt as a self-addressed utterance: the experimenter looked at the ceiling, chin in hand, during and after the prompt. Children gave evidence of false-belief understanding in this task, but failed when the experimenter looked at the child during and after the prompt. These results reinforce claims of robust continuity in early false-belief reasoning and provide additional support for the distinction between nonelicited-and elicited-response false-belief tasks. Three accounts of the discrepant results obtained with these tasks-and of early false-belief understanding more generally-are discussed.
Eighteen-month-olds understand false beliefs in an unexpected-contents task
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 2014
Recent studies suggest that infants understand that others can have false beliefs. However, most of these studies have used looking time measures, and the few that have used behavioral measures are all based on the change-of-location paradigm, leading to claims that infants might use behavioral rules instead of mental state understanding to pass these tests. We investigated infants' false-belief reasoning using a different paradigm. In this unexpected-contents helping task, 18-month-olds were familiarized with boxes for blocks that contained blocks. When an experimenter subsequently reached for a box for blocks that now contained a spoon, infants based their choice of whether to give her a spoon or a block on her true or false belief about which object the block box contained. These results help to demonstrate the flexibility of infants' false-belief understanding.
We can understand and act upon the beliefs of other people, even when these conflict with our own beliefs. Children's development of this ability, known as Theory of Mind, typically happens around age 4. Research using a looking-time paradigm, however, established that toddlers at the age of 15 months old pass a non-verbal false-belief task (Onishi and Baillargeon in Science 308: [255][256][257][258] 2005). This is well before the age at which children pass any of the verbal false-belief tasks. In this study we present a more complex case of false-belief reasoning with older children. We tested second-order reasoning, probing children's ability to handle the belief of one person about the belief of another person. We find just the opposite: 7-year-olds pass a verbal false-belief reasoning task, but fail on an equally complex low-verbal task. This finding suggests that language supports explicit reasoning about beliefs, perhaps by facilitating the cognitive system to keep track of beliefs attributed by people to other people.