skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Explore Research Products in the PAR
It may take a few hours for recently added research products to appear in PAR search results.


Title: Understanding pretense as causal inference
There is a long-standing interest in the role that children’s understanding of pretense plays in their more general theory of mind development. Some argue that children understand pretense as a mental state, and the capacity to pretend is indicative of children possessing the capacity for mental representations. Others argue that children understand pretense in terms of actions and appearances, and an understanding of the mental states involved in pretending has a prolonged developmental trajectory. The goal of this paper is to integrate these ideas by positing that children understand pretense as a form of causal inference, which is based on both their general causal reasoning capacities and specific knowledge of mental states. I will first review literature on children’s understanding of pretense, and how such understanding can be conceptualized as integrating with children’s causal reasoning ability. I will then consider how children’s causal knowledge affects the ways they make inferences about others’ pretense. Next, I will consider the role of causal knowledge more broadly in children’s reasoning about pretense worlds, judgments of possibility, and counterfactual reasoning. Taken together the goal of this review is to synthesize how children understand pretending into a rational constructivist framework for understanding social cognitive development in a more integrative manner.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1917639
PAR ID:
10561088
Author(s) / Creator(s):
Publisher / Repository:
Developmental Review
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Developmental Review
Volume:
68
Issue:
C
ISSN:
0273-2297
Page Range / eLocation ID:
101065
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. ; ; (, Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society)
    People’s mental states constantly change as they navigate and interact with their environment. Accordingly, social reasoning requires us not only to represent mental states but also to understand the ways in which mental states tend to change. Despite their importance, relatively little is known about children’s understanding of the dynamics of mental states. To explore this question, we studied a common type of mental state change: knowledge gain. Specifically, we studied whether five- and six-year-olds distinguish between agents who gain knowledge from those who lose knowledge. In one condition, children saw an agent answer a two-alternative choice question incorrectly, followed by an identical-looking agent who answered the same question correctly (i.e., gaining knowledge). In another condition, children saw the reverse pattern (i.e., losing knowledge). Children were more likely to infer they had seen two different agents in the knowledge loss condition relative to the knowledge gain condition. These results suggest that children have intuitions about how epistemic states change and open new questions about children’s naive theories of mental state dynamics. 
    more » « less
  2. ; (, Child Development)
    Emotional expressions are abundant in children’s lives. What role do they play in children’s causal inference and exploration? This study investigates whether preschool‐aged children use others’ emotional expressions to infer the presence of unknown causal functions and guide their exploration accordingly. Children (age: 3.0–4.9;N = 112, the United States) learned about one salient causal function of a novel toy and then saw an adult play with it. Children explored the toy more when the adult expressed surprise than when she expressed happiness (Experiment 1), but only when the adult already knew about the toy’s salient function (Experiment 2). These results suggest that children consider others’ knowledge and selectively interpret others’ surprise asvicarious predictionerrorto guide their own exploration. 
    more » « less
  3. ; ; ; (, Current Directions in Psychological Science)
    The majority of research on infants’ and children’s understanding of emotional expressions has focused on their abilities to use emotional expressions to infer how other people feel. However, an emerging body of work suggests that emotional expressions support rich, powerful inferences not just about emotional states but also about other unobserved states, such as hidden events in the physical world and mental states of other people (e.g., beliefs and desires). Here we argue that infants and children harness others’ emotional expressions as a source of information for learning about the physical and social world broadly. This “emotion as information” framework integrates affective, developmental, and computational cognitive sciences, extending the scope of signals that count as “information” in early learning. 
    more » « less
  4. ; (, Current Directions in Psychological Science)
    How do humans build and navigate their complex social world? Standard theoretical frameworks often attribute this success to a foundational capacity to analyze other people’s appearance and behavior to make inferences about their unobservable mental states. Here we argue that this picture is incomplete. Human behavior leaves traces in our physical environment that reveal our presence, our goals, and even our beliefs and knowledge. A new body of research shows that, from early in life, humans easily detect these traces—sometimes spontaneously—and readily extract social information from the physical world. From the features and placement of inanimate objects, people make inferences about past events and how people have shaped the physical world. This capacity develops early and helps explain how people have such a rich understanding of others: by drawing not only on how others act but also on the environments they have shaped. Overall, social cognition is crucial not only to our reasoning about people and actions but also to our everyday reasoning about the inanimate world. 
    more » « less
  5. (, Child Development Perspectives)
    Abstract Children’s memberships in social groups have profound effects on their motivation. Stereotypes about social groups shape children’s beliefs about what is expected for their group members. These beliefs can influence children’s developing beliefs about themselves (self‐perceptions). In this article, I review research on how gender stereotypes influence children’s motivation in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), including ability beliefs and sense of belonging. When children belong to a gender group that is negatively stereotyped in a STEM field, they may doubt their own capabilities and whether they belong in that field, making it harder for them to develop interest over time. Developmentally, the influence of gender stereotypes on motivation begins during preschool and strengthens during late childhood. I also address the consequences of different kinds of stereotypes and why some children are more influenced by stereotypes than others. Understanding this process in childhood will help researchers design effective interventions to remedy educational inequities in STEM. 
    more » « less
  • Citation Formats
  • MLA
  • APA
  • Chicago
  • BibTeX
  • Save / Share this Record
  • Send to Email