title: Facilitating children's understanding of misinterpretation: explanatory efforts and improvements in perspective taking.
abstract: The authors investigated children's understanding of how mistaken beliefs can arise through misinterpretation of ambiguous information. Children (N = 91), aged 4 to 5 years, were given pre- and posttests on their ability to infer a puppet's interpretation of a restricted-view drawing after the puppet had been led to an erroneous expectation about the drawing's identity. Before the posttest, the children received either self-explanation training or other-explanation training in which they explained the source of their own or a puppet's misinterpretations of drawings; a control group received no training. The children who received training improved from pre- to posttest, and those who had practiced explaining misinterpretations by referring to previously viewed pictures or to features of a target picture showed the greatest improvement. These results indicate that learning to explain misinterpretations can help children recognize situations in which misinterpretations are likely to occur.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Northern Illinois University, De Kalb 60115-2892, USA. pillow@niu.edu
authors.forename: Bradford H
authors.initials: BH
authors.lastname: Pillow
authors.forename: Clay
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Mash
authors.forename: Samuel
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Aloian
authors.forename: Valerie
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Hill
mesh_terms: D002675:Child, Preschool; D003210:Concept Formation; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009949:Orientation; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D010470:Perceptual Masking; D011214:Practice, Psychological; D011340:Problem Solving; D011601:Psychophysics