The Child's Theory of Mind

By Henry Wellman, Susan Carey, Lila R. Gleitman, Elissa L. Newport, Elizabeth S. Spelke. 1990

Wellman presents evidence that children as young as age three do possess a commonsense theory of mind—that they grasp the distinction between mental constructs and physical entities and that they have an understanding of the relationship between individuals' mental states and their overt actions. He delves in detail into questions about the nature of adults' commonsense theories of mind and about the nature of commonsense theories. Wellman then examines the content of the three-year-old's theory of mind, the nature of children's notions of mind before age three, the changes in the theory during subsequent development from ages three to six, and the young child's conception of mind in comparison with those of older children and adults. Bradford Books imprint

Subfields: Cognitive Science & Psychology

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Citations in the corpus

Cognitive templates for religious concepts: cross-cultural evidence for recall of counter-intuitive representations (2001, background): “Gods that perceive everything or predict the future violate earlydeveloped assumptions about intentional agency and about the causal links between events, perceptions and beliefs (Wellmann, 1990; Perner, 1991; Gopnik, 1993).”
Culture and systems of thought: holistic versus analytic cognition. (2001, background): “Naive theories of mechanics and physics (Baillargeon, 1995; Carey & Spelke, 1994; Leslie, 1982; Spelke, 1988, 1990), naive theories of biology (Atran, 1990, 1995; Berlin, 1992; Berlin, Breedlove, & Raven, 1973; Gelman, 1988) and naive theory of mind (Asch, 1952; D'Andrade, 1987; Leslie, 1994; Wellma”
The cognitive functions of language (2002, background): “…accepts that our mind-reading capacity comes in degrees, developing in stages between nine months (or earlier) and around four years of age; and a number of related proposals have been made concerning the stages which young children pass through (Gopnik & Melzoff 1997; Perner 1991; Wellman 1990).”
Infants track action goals within and across agents. (2007, background): “By the preschool years, children evidence knowledge of this aspect of folk psychology ( Wellman, 1990 ).”
Executive function and the promotion of social–emotional competence (2006, background): “Theory of mind refers to children's awareness and understanding of the mental states of others, and the effect of others' mental states on their beliefs and behaviors (Wellman, 1990).”
Complements to cognition: a longitudinal study of the relationship between complex syntax and false-belief-understanding (2002, background): “Thus children’s talk about mental states, using verbs such as “want”, “need”, “think”, “know”, and “remember” is taken as a sign that the concepts of the corresponding mental states have developed (Bartsch & Wellman, 1995; Bretherton & Beeghly, 1982; Shatz, Wellman, & Silber, 1983; Wellman, 1990).”
Development of children’s knowledge about the mental world (2000, background): “Around the same time, Wellman and his co-workers had independently begun to conceptualise children’s developing metacognitive knowledge and understanding of mental terms as the development of a theory of mind (e.g., Johnson & Wellman, 1980; Shatz, Wellman, & Silber, 1983; Wellman, 1983, 1985).”
Mind-making practices: the social infrastructure of self-knowing agency and responsibility (2015, background): “…include: Sellars (1997), Lewis (1972), Dennett (1969, 1987), Fodor (1968, 1987), Churchland (1979), Carruthers (1996), Premack and Woodruff (1978), Wellman (1990), Meltzoff and Gopnik (1993), Gopnik and Wellman (1995), Gopnik and Meltzoff (1997), Gopnik, Meltzoff, and Kuhl (1999), Gopnik,…”
Mindreading in Infancy (2013, background): “…their other differences) are 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…”
Children's causal inferences from indirect evidence: Backwards blocking and Bayesian reasoning in preschoolers (2004, background): “Over the last twenty years a number of investigators have argued that children develop domains including psychology, biology and physics (see e.g., Carey, 1985; Gopnik & Meltzoff, 1997; Gopnik & Wellman, 1994; Wellman, 1990).”
Robotic pets in the lives of preschool children (2004, unknown): “desires, beliefs, and intentions (Gopnik & Meltzoff, 1998; Tomasello, 2000; Wellman, 1990 ).”
Children's Reasoning about Norms and Traits as Motives for Behavior. (2004, background): “Research in theory of mind suggests that children as young as 2- or 3-years of age reason according the practical syllogism (Wellman, 1990).”
Learning from others: children's construction of concepts. (2009, background): “By at least 3 years of age, children readily distinguish reality from fantasy (Taylor 1999, Woolley & Wellman 1990), as well as living things from highly similar yet distinct contrast cases (R. Gelman et al. 1995, Gelman & Opfer 2002, Jipson & Gelman 2007).”
Theory of mind and social behavior: Causal models tested in a longitudinal study. (2000, background): “Some authors have remarked on changes in children's behavior, such as the way they play hide-and-seek, that develop around the same age as that at which they start to pass false belief tasks (Perner, 1991; Wellman, 1990).”