Words, thoughts, and theories

By Alison Gopnik, Andrew N. Meltzoff. 1997

Subfields: Cognitive Science & Psychology

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Citations in the corpus

A theory of causal learning in children: causal maps and Bayes nets. (2004, background): “These would correspond to the innate “starting-state” theories proposed by some “theory theorists” (see Gopnik & Meltzoff, 1997; Gopnik & Wellman, 1994 .”
Phonetic learning as a pathway to language: new data and native language magnet theory expanded (NLM-e) (2008, background): “Accounts of infant speech perception, such as those of Jusczyk (1997), Kuhl (1992, 2000a) and more recently Werker & Curtin (2005), increasingly resemble more general developmental cognitive learning models (Karmiloff-Smith 1992; Elman et al. 1996; Gopnik & Meltzoff 1997).”
Darwin's mistake: Explaining the discontinuity between human and nonhuman minds (2008, unknown): “…have argued that normal humans – not just scientists or philosophers – form " intuitive theories " or " mental models " about the unobservable principles and causal forces that shape relations in a specific domain (e.g., Carey 1985; Gopnik & Meltzoff 1997; Keil 1989; Murphy & Medin 1985).”
Reconstructing constructivism: Causal models, Bayesian learning mechanisms and the theory theory (2012, unknown): “…that the acquisition of particular linguistic structures can indeed reshape conceptual understanding in several other domains, closer to intuitive theories (see, e.g., Casasola, 2005; Gopnik, Choi, & Baumberger, 1996; Gopnik & Meltzoff, 1997; Pyers & Senghas, 2009; Shusterman & Spelke, 2005).”
Linguistic determinism and the understanding of false beliefs. (2000, background): “Similarly, Gopnik and Meltzoff (1997) propose that conceptual and semantic development may go hand in hand: at particular periods of development when the child is actively engaged in solving specific conceptual problems (such as those to do with a theory of mind) their attention may be drawn to lear”
The emergence of music from the Theory of Mind (2009, background): “The first route, called the ‘child as scientist’ explanation, is an ontogenetic selective process whereby developing individuals test theories empirically and discard those that are unsuccessful (Gopnik & Meltzoff, 1997; Klahr, 2000).”
Elements of a Lay Theory of Groups: Types of Groups, Relational Styles, and the Perception of Group Entitativity (2001, background): “…have extensively examined how children (and adults) make sense of other people's minds and are able to make inferences about people's beliefs, desires, and intentions based on the scant behavioral data that are available during social interactions (Gopnik & Meltzoff, 1997; Wellman, 1990).”
Mindreading in Infancy (2013, background): “…united in thinking that the representational resources available for mindreading develop in (at least) two stages (Wellman, 1990; Baron-Cohen, 1995; Gopnik and Meltzoff, 1997; Nichols and Stich, 2003; Scott and Baillargeon, 2009).12 The first of these involves the notions of desire, perceptual…”
“Do you know what I want?” Preschoolers’ talk about desires, thoughts and feelings in their conversations with sibs and friends (2007, result): “This contrasts with the ‘‘theory theory’’ model, in which children apply their knowledge of the mind equally to themselves and others (Gopnik & Meltzoff, 1997), but fits well with the simulation account, in which the ability to set aside one’s own knowledge and imagine oneself in the others’ place…”
Theory of mind as inverse reinforcement learning (2019, background): “This capacity, called a Theory of Mind [1,2], lets us intuit how people we’re familiar with might act in different situations.”
The Cognitive Basis of Science: Scientific cognition as distributed cognition (2002, background): “The underlying assumption, often explicit as in Gopnik (1996a) and Gopnik and Meltzoff (1997), is that what we learn about conceptual development in Giere 17 infants and children can be applied to conceptual development in science.”