A Child's Theory of Mind

By B. Bower. 1993

Subfields: Cognitive Science & Psychology

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cognitive Science & Psychology

Citations in the corpus

Neural Theory-of-Mind? On the Limits of Social Intelligence in Large LMs (2022, background): “Interestingly, the development of Theory of Mind and language seem to happen around similar ages in children (Sperber and Wilson, 1986; Wellman, 1992; Miller, 2006; Tauzin and Gergely, 2018).”
Machine Theory of Mind (2018, background): “Humans recognise that other agents do not base their decisions directly on the state of the world, but rather on an internal representation, or belief about the state of the world (Leslie, 1987; Gopnik & Astington, 1988; Wellman, 1992).”
A theory of causal learning in children: causal maps and Bayes nets. (2004, neutral): “…of the theory theory : the idea that children have intuitive theories of the world, analogous to scientific theories, and that these theories change in ways that are similar to scientific theory change (Carey, 1985; Gopnik, 1988; Gopnik & Meltzoff, 1997; Keil, 1989; Perner, 1991; Wellman, 1990 .”
Metarepresentation in linguistic communication (2000, background): “Developmental studies of quotation have provided useful data on the production side, tracing the development of propositional-attitude verbs such as 'think', 'want', 'hope', 'fear', for example (Bartsch & Wellman 1995; Bretherton & Beeghly 1982; Wellman 1990).”
Attribution theories: How people make sense of behavior. (2011, background): “This framework is incompatible with what we know about children’s emerging theory of mind and behavior – the conceptual network that 4–5-year-olds rely on when interpreting human behavior (Perner, 1991; Gopnik & Meltzoff, 1997; Wellman, 1990).”
The Theory Theory as an Alternative to the Innateness Hypothesis (2008, methodology): “This account has been successfully applied to explain children’s developing understanding of the physical world (Gopnik, 1988; Smith, Carey, and Wiser, 1985) the biological world (Carey, 1985; Gelman & Wellman, 1991; Keil, 1989) and the psychological world (Gopnik, 1993; Wellman, 1990; Perner, 1991)”
Detecting blickets: how young children use information about novel causal powers in categorization and induction. (2000, background): “0009-3920/2000/7105-0011 1206 Child Development 1989; Perner, 1991; Wellman, 1990 ).”
Theory of mind and self-concept in preadolescents : Links with gender and language (2000, background): “Often referred to as "theory of mind" (ToM) or "social understanding," this way of viewing sociocognitive development provides a new framework to explore how psychological understanding of self and others develops (Astington, 1993; Harter, 1999; Wellman, 1990).”
Development of Children's Understanding of Connections Between Thinking and Feeling (2001, background): “As Wellman (1990) and other researchers have pointed out, part of what it means is that people’s folk knowledge about the mind is organized and richly interconnected, with different mental states conceptualized as being causally linked to one another, to environmental input, and to behavioral…”
Executive function and theory of mind: stability and prediction from ages 2 to 3. (2004, background): “A representational ToM assessed with measures like false belief tasks is not in place until age 5, although it is widely acknowledged that there are progenitors to a full-fledged understanding of mind (Perner, 1991; Wellman, 1990; Wellman, Cross, & Watson, 2001).”
Development of social cognition in infant chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes): face recognition, smiling, gaze, and the lack of triadic interactions (2004, background): “Nevertheless, many researchers began trying to find the prerequisites for the 5-year-old’s theory of mind in much younger children (Wellman, 1992).”
Limits on theory of mind use in adults. (2003, background): “Some argue that this ability appears relatively early (e.g. Chandler, Fritz, & Hala, 1989; Fodor, 1992; Leslie, 2000) and others that it reliably appears only after the age of 4 (e.g. Gopnik & Wellman, 1992; Perner, 1991; Perner, Leekam & Wimmer, 1987; Wellman, 1990).”
How People Learn: Bridging Research and Practice (2013, background): “Children begin in preschool years to develop sophisticated understandings (whether accurate or not) of the phenomena around them (Wellman, 1990).”
Linguistic determinism and the understanding of false beliefs. (2000, background): “Hence in many cases the emergence of children’s talk about mental states, using verbs such as “want”, “need”, “think”, “know”, and “remember” has been taken as a marker of their growing underlying conceptual understanding of a variety of mental states in themselves and others (Bretherton & Beeghly, ”
Personal Epistemology Research: Implications for Learning and Teaching (2001, background): “Epistemological thinking may be foreshadowed in the early recognition of other’s beliefs, desires, and intentions that make up theory of mind (Wellman, 1990), and be grounded in the attainment of interpretive theory of mind (Chandler and Carpendale, 1998; Kuhn, 2000b).”
1 Imitation and Other Minds: The "Like Me" Hypothesis (2005, background): “Further developments are needed for understanding false beliefs and other mental states, which are farther from the action, as it were (e.g., Astington & Gopnik, 1991; Bruner, 1999; Flavell, 1999; Harris, 1989; Humphrey, 2002; Meltzoff et al., 1999; Wellman, 1990, 2002; Perner, 1991).”
Toward a framework for levels of robot autonomy in human-robot interaction (2014, background): “Initially centering on child development (Wellman, 1992), this theory now commonly refers to a person’s ability to attribute mental states to self and others.”
Children's ability to distinguish between memories from multiple sources: Implications for the quality and accuracy of eyewitness statements. (2002, unknown): “…the gradual development of competent source monitoring and suggest that source monitoring for self-generated items may also be dependent on the gradual development of metacognitive understanding during the preschool period (see Frye & Moore, 1991; Olson, Astington, & Harris, 1988; Wellman, 1990).”