title: Conceptual coherence in the child's theory of mind: training children to understand belief.
abstract: Intuitive theories are defined as coherently interrelated systems of concepts that generate explanations and predictions in a particular domain of experience. 2 studies tested whether the child's theory of mind can be characterized as an intuitive theory. In Study 1, 3-year-old children who did not pass a false belief pretest were trained in 2 groups: (1) on the concept of belief, or (2) on the related concepts of desire and perception. Training took place over 2 weeks, with children given mental state tasks and receiving feedback according to their performance. Both training groups showed improved false belief performance on the posttest, compared to a control group trained on number conservation. This result is interpreted as demonstrating coherence in the child's theory of mind. In Study 2, these findings were repeated and expanded: training on belief as well as training on desire and perception resulted in improved performance on a variety of standard theory of mind posttests. Results are discussed with respect to competing theories of children's intuitive psychological knowledge.
authors.affiliation: University of California, Berkeley, USA. vps@psy.uq.edu.au
authors.forename: V
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Slaughter
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Gopnik
mesh_terms: D002652:Child Behavior; D002657:Child Development; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003071:Cognition; D003210:Concept Formation; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D002666:Psychology, Child