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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.
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Children’s Expectations About Epistemic Change
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.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2045778
- PAR ID:
- 10573980
- Publisher / Repository:
- Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society
- Date Published:
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Posted Content:
- https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/awq3s
