Roth D, Leslie A M
Department of Psychology, Tel Aviv University, Israel.
Cognition. 1998 Apr;66(1):1-31. doi: 10.1016/s0010-0277(98)00005-5.
Solving belief problems develops as a skill in normal children during the preschool years. To understand this process of development, it is necessary to provide an analysis of the tasks used to test preschool 'theory of mind' skills. This analysis should allow us to relate the structure of a given task to the underlying cognitive mechanisms that the task engages. In two experiments, we find that 3-year-old children show a pattern of success and failure on belief tasks that is not consistent with 'conceptual deficit' accounts. Young children possess the concept, BELIEF, but have certain characteristic difficulties with correctly calculating the contents of beliefs. In childhood autism, by contrast, the mechanisms that in normal development bestow conceptual competence in this domain are impaired. In the first experiment, parallel task structures are used to show that 3-year-olds are no better at predicting behavior from a partially true belief than they are at predicting behavior from an entirely false belief. We develop specific proposals about task structural factors that either facilitate or hinder success in belief-content calculation. These proposals are supported in a second experiment. We compare two false-belief tasks, one of which has helpful structural factors, the other of which has hampering factors, with a third task which exemplifies a hampering task structure but without any theory of mind content. We compare 3- and 4-year-olds' patterns of performance with that of autistic children. Each of the three groups shows a distinct performance profile across the three tasks, as predicted for each case by our model. Innate attentional mechanisms provide the conceptual foundations for 'theory of mind' but must be supplemented by a robust executive process that allows false beliefs to achieve 'conceptual pop-out.' Our approach has general implications for the study of conceptual development.
解决信念问题是正常儿童在学前阶段逐渐发展起来的一项技能。为了理解这一发展过程，有必要对用于测试学前儿童“心理理论”技能的任务进行分析。这种分析应使我们能够将特定任务的结构与该任务所涉及的潜在认知机制联系起来。在两项实验中，我们发现3岁儿童在信念任务上的成功与失败模式与“概念缺陷”观点不一致。幼儿拥有信念这一概念，但在正确计算信念内容方面存在某些典型困难。相比之下，在儿童自闭症中，正常发育过程中赋予该领域概念能力的机制受到了损害。在第一个实验中，使用了平行任务结构来表明，3岁儿童从部分真实信念预测行为的能力并不比从完全错误信念预测行为的能力更强。我们针对任务结构因素提出了具体建议，这些因素要么促进要么阻碍信念内容计算的成功。这些建议在第二个实验中得到了支持。我们比较了两个错误信念任务，其中一个具有有助于任务完成的结构因素，另一个具有阻碍因素，还与第三个任务进行了比较，第三个任务体现了一种阻碍任务结构但没有任何心理理论内容。我们比较了3岁和4岁儿童以及自闭症儿童的表现模式。正如我们的模型对每种情况所预测的那样，三组中的每一组在这三个任务中都呈现出独特的表现特征。先天的注意力机制为“心理理论”提供了概念基础，但必须辅之以强大的执行过程，以使错误信念能够实现“概念凸显”。我们的方法对概念发展的研究具有普遍意义。
