Theses and Dissertations
This collection includes both ASU Theses and Dissertations, submitted by graduate students, and the Barrett, Honors College theses submitted by undergraduate students.
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- Creators: Fabricius, William
Description
Introspective awareness refers to direct access to one’s own internal and subjective thoughts and feelings (Wimmer & Hartl, 1991). Two theories, simulation theory and theory-theory, have been used to understand our access to our mental states. Simulation theory (Harris, 1991) involves imagining yourself in another person’s situation, reading off of your mental state, and attributing that state to the other person. Theory-theory (Gopnik, 1993) involves an interrelated body of knowledge, based on core mental-state constructs, including beliefs and desires, that may be applied to everyone—self and others (Gopnik & Wellman, 1994). Introspection is taken for granted by simulation theory, and explicitly denied by theory-theory. This study is designed to test for evidence of introspection in young children using simple perception and knowledge task. The current evidence is against introspective awareness in children because the data suggest that children cannot report their own false beliefs and they cannot report their on-going thoughts (Flavell, Green & Flavell, 1993; Gopnik & Astington, 1988). The hypothesis in this study states that children will perform better on Self tasks compared to Other tasks, which will be evidence for introspection. The Other-Perception tasks require children to calculate the other’s line of sight and determine if there is something obscuring his or her vision. The Other-Knowledge tasks require children to reason that the other’s previous looking inside a box means that he or she will know what is inside the box when it is closed. The corresponding Self tasks could be answered either by using the same reasoning for the self or by introspection to determine what it is they see and do not see, and know and do not know. Children performing better on Self tasks compared to Other tasks will be an indication of introspection. Tests included Yes/No and Forced Choice questions, which was initially to ensure that the results will not be caused by a feature of a single method of questioning. I realized belatedly, however, that Forced Choice was not a valid measure of introspection as children could introspect in both the Self and Other conditions. I also expect to replicate previous findings that reasoning about Perception is easier for children than reasoning about Knowledge.
ContributorsAamed, Mati (Author) / Fabricius, William (Thesis director) / Glenberg, Arthur (Committee member) / Kupfer, Anne (Committee member) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / T. Denny Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics (Contributor)
Created2013-12
Description
Current research has consistently shown that children substantially younger than 2 years of age understand object permanence; i.e. infants have realistic expectations of where hidden objects should reappear, and they react with increased looking time to experimenter-manipulated violations of object permanence. However, new research has revealed that 2-year-olds' understanding of object permanence does not seem to transfer to active search tasks. Although infants look longer when an object moves behind a screen and is subsequently shown to have "magically" passed through a solid barrier, 2-year-olds do not search correctly for an object that has moved behind a panel of four doors and stopped at a barrier that is visible above the correct door. However, 2-year-olds do search flawlessly on a warm-up task in which the experimenter hides a stationary object behind one of the doors. Due to these conflicting results, I designed three search tasks to test whether the method of hiding the object affects young 2-year-olds' ability to successfully search. I used a simplified three-door apparatus with stationary objects in which children were allowed to search only one door per trial. In the Hide-3 search task, the experimenter opened a door, placed a toy in the doorway, and closed the door. In the Reveal-3 search task, all doors opened and closed simultaneously without the experimenter touching one door, and a toy was revealed already in place in a doorway. In the Reveal-2 search task, the experimenter hid the toy identically as in Reveal-3, except a hand puppet opened an incorrect door immediately after the toy was hidden, leaving two remaining doors for the child to search. If infants' and 2-year-olds' knowledge of a hidden object's location is activated in previous looking time experiments, then the puppet's incorrect search in Reveal-2 should facilitate their search performance relative to Reveal-3 by activating this knowledge. My results suggest that young 2-year-olds are not using knowledge of the hidden object's location to guide search. Instead, their performance is best explained by a utilization of alternate search strategies including imitation of the adult and salience differentials between search options. These results call into question a fundamental tenet of modern child psychology, that by 2 years of age children use their knowledge of object permanence to guide search under a variety of hiding and disappearance conditions.
ContributorsHarkins, James Montgomery (Author) / Fabricius, William (Thesis director) / Glenberg, Arthur (Committee member) / Keen, Rachel (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-12
Description
How do children understand how others see the world? I examined correlations between 4-8 year old children's understanding of beliefs and their understanding of other ways that people represent the world. Beliefs that I measured are understanding of pretense, understanding that things can have multiple identities, understanding that people can know things by inference, and understanding that people can look at the same thing and have different representations of it. I predicted that there would be correlations among these tasks. In particular, I predicted children would be able to understand these tasks when they understood true and false beliefs, based on current theories on belief understanding. I predicted that the classic false belief task alone would not be a good predictor of task performance, but that the combination of true and false belief tasks would. Participants were 100 children recruited at the Phoenix Children's Museum between ages 4 and 8. Previous research has found that children pass all of these tasks between the ages of 6 and 8, but no other studies have looked at the inter-correlations among them. Contrary to my prediction, children did not pass these tasks all at once, but scores went up gradually with age and belief understanding.
ContributorsLaitin, Emily Lynne (Author) / Fabricius, William (Thesis director) / Glenberg, Arthur (Committee member) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / School of Sustainability (Contributor) / W. P. Carey School of Business (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-12