Why the Child's Theory of Mind Really Is a Theory

By Alison Gopnik, Henry Wellman. 1992

Subfields: Cognitive Science & Psychology, Philosophy

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

1. Josh Tenenbaum
2. Tobias Gerstenberg
3. Laura Schulz
4. Noah D. Goodman
5. C. N. Macrae
6. Richard Breheny
7. Jason P. Mitchell
8. Tomer D. Ullman

In Philosophy

1. Josh Tenenbaum
2. Jamil Zaki
3. Victoria McGeer
4. Kathleen E. Metz
5. F. Clément
6. Joel Krueger
7. Tad Zawidzki
8. Richard Breheny

Citations in the corpus

• Machine Theory of Mind (2018, background): “A prominent argument from cognitive psychology is that our social reasoning instead relies on high-level models of other agents (Gopnik & Wellman, 1992).”
• The function of folk psychology: mind reading or mind shaping? (2008, background): “Most theories of folk psychology appeal to this practice as a model of what we do when we ascribe mental states to others (Wellman 1990 ; Gopnik and Wellman 1995 ; Gopnik 1996 ).”
• 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).”
• Probabilistic Recursive Reasoning for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (2019, unknown): “Those interests usually indicates unobservable mental state including desires, beliefs, and intentions (Premack & Woodruff, 1978; Gopnik & Wellman, 1992).”
• Theory of Mind and Preference Learning at the Interface of Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, and AI: A Review (2022, methodology): “Examples of different strategies for ToM are the theory-theory approach (Gopnik and Wellman, 1992) and the simulation-theory approach (Gordon, 1986).”
• Action Anticipation Through Attribution of False Belief by 2-Year-Olds (2007, background): “This result poses an immense challenge for proponents of the view that theory of mind undergoes a conceptual revolution when children are around 4 years of age (e.g., Gopnik & Wellman, 1992; Ruffman & Perner, 2005; Saxe, Carey, & Kanwisher, 2004).”
• The Theory-Ladenness of Observation and the Theory-Ladenness of the Rest of the Scientific Process (2001, background): “Recent examples include schemata (Brewer and Nakamura 1984), mental models (Johnson-Laird 1983), naive theories (Gopnik and Wellman 1992), and perceptual symbols (Barsalou 1999); see Rumelhart and Norman 1988 and Brewer 1999 for reviews.”