Fizke Ella, Butterfill Stephen, van de Loo Lea, Reindl Eva, Rakoczy Hannes
Institute of Psychology and Leibniz Science Campus "Primate Cognition", University of Göttingen, 37073 Göttingen, Germany.
Department of Philosophy, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2017 Oct;162:209-224. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2017.05.005. Epub 2017 Jun 14.
Current theory-of-mind research faces the challenge of reconciling two sets of seemingly incompatible findings: Whereas children come to solve explicit verbal false belief (FB) tasks from around 4years of age, recent studies with various less explicit measures such as looking time, anticipatory looking, and spontaneous behavior suggest that even infants can succeed on some FB tasks. In response to this tension, two-systems theories propose to distinguish between an early-developing system, tracking simple forms of mental states, and a later-developing system, based on fully developed concepts of belief and other propositional attitudes. One prediction of such theories is that the early-developing system has signature limits concerning aspectuality. We tested this prediction in two experiments. The first experiment showed (in line with previous findings) that 2- and 3-year-olds take into account a protagonist's true or false belief about the location of an object in their active helping behavior. In contrast, toddlers' helping behavior did not differentiate between true and false belief conditions when the protagonist's belief essentially involved aspectuality. Experiment 2 replicated these findings with a more stringent method designed to rule out more parsimonious explanations. Taken together, the current findings are compatible with the possibility that early theory-of-mind reasoning is subject to signature limits as predicted by the two-systems account.
虽然儿童大约从4岁开始能够解决明确的言语错误信念（FB）任务，但最近使用各种不太明确的测量方法（如注视时间、预期注视和自发行为）进行的研究表明，即使是婴儿在某些FB任务上也能成功。为应对这种矛盾，双系统理论提出区分一个早期发展的系统，该系统追踪心理状态的简单形式，以及一个后期发展的系统，该系统基于信念和其他命题态度的充分发展的概念。这类理论的一个预测是，早期发展的系统在事态性方面存在标志性限制。我们在两个实验中对这一预测进行了测试。第一个实验表明（与之前的研究结果一致），2岁和3岁的儿童在积极的帮助行为中会考虑主角对物体位置的真实或错误信念。相比之下，当主角的信念主要涉及事态性时，幼儿的帮助行为在真实信念和错误信念条件之间没有差异。实验2使用一种更严格的方法重复了这些发现，该方法旨在排除更简单的解释。综合来看，当前的研究结果与早期心理理论推理如双系统理论所预测的那样受到标志性限制的可能性是相符的。
