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A cornerstone of children’s socio-cognitive development is understanding that others can have knowledge, thoughts, and perceptions that differ from one’s own. Preschool-aged children often have difficulty with this kind of social understanding, i.e., they lack an explicit theory of mind. The goal of this dissertation was to examine the role

A cornerstone of children’s socio-cognitive development is understanding that others can have knowledge, thoughts, and perceptions that differ from one’s own. Preschool-aged children often have difficulty with this kind of social understanding, i.e., they lack an explicit theory of mind. The goal of this dissertation was to examine the role mental state language as a developmental mechanism of children’s early understanding of their own mental states (i.e., their introspective ability). Specifically, it was hypothesized that (1) parents’ ability to recognize and appropriately label their children’s mental states and (2) children’s linguistic ability to distinguish between their mental states shapes the development of children’s introspective ability. An initial prediction of the first hypothesis is that parents should recognized differences in the development of children’s self- and other-understanding in order to better help their children’s introspective development. In support of this prediction, parents (N = 400, Mage = 58 months, Range = 28-93 months) reported that children’s understanding of their own knowledge was greater than children’s understanding of others’ knowledge. A prediction of the second hypothesis is that children’s linguistic ability to distinguish between and appropriately label their own mental states should determine their ability to make fined grained judgments of mental states like certainty. In support of this prediction, children’s (N = 197, Mage = 56 months, Range = 36-82 months) ability to distinguish between their own knowledge and ignorance states was associated children’s ability to engage in uncertainty monitoring. Together, these findings provide support for the association between children’s linguistic environment and ability and their introspective development.
ContributorsGonzales, Christopher Ryan (Author) / Fabricius, William V. (Thesis advisor) / Spinrad, Tracy (Committee member) / Glenberg, Arthur (Committee member) / Horne, Zachary (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
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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

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
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

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
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Description
In this study, the oppositional processes theory was proposed to suggest that reliance on semantic and episodic memory systems hinder originality during idea generation for divergent thinking tasks that are generally used to assess creative potential. In order to investigate the proposed oppositional processes theory, three experiments that manipulated the

In this study, the oppositional processes theory was proposed to suggest that reliance on semantic and episodic memory systems hinder originality during idea generation for divergent thinking tasks that are generally used to assess creative potential. In order to investigate the proposed oppositional processes theory, three experiments that manipulated the memory accessibility in participants during the alternative uses tasks were conducted. Experiment 1 directly instructed participants to either generate usages based on memory or not from memory; Experiment 2 provided participants with object cues that were either very common or very rare in daily life (i.e., bottle vs. canteen); Experiment 3 replicated the same manipulation from Experiment 2 with much longer generation time (10 minutes in Experiment 2 vs. 30 minutes in Experiment 3). The oppositional processes theory predicted that participants who had less access to direct and unaltered usages (i.e., told to not use memory, were given rare cues, or were outputting items later in the generation period) during the task would be more creative. Results generally supported the predictions in Experiments 1 and 2 where participants from conditions which limited their access to memory generated more novel usages that were considered more creative by independent coders. Such effects were less prominent in Experiment 3 with extended generation time but the trends remained the same.
ContributorsXu, Dongchen (Author) / Brewer, Gene (Thesis advisor) / Glenberg, Arthur (Committee member) / Homa, Donald (Committee member) / Goldinger, Stephen (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017