Humans possess the ability to infer and track mental states, which allows for successful interaction in the social world. The collection of processes and representations that makes this possible is referred to as a theory-of-mind (ToM). A large body of work has examined how these abilities develop from infancy to adulthood, focusing on the roles of experience, including language learning, and on maturational changes, such as increase in executive ability. However, relatively little work has focused on the kinds of learning processes that may be involved in this development. We propose that a key process in this development is analogical comparison. Our hypothesis is that children use analogical comparison to acquire abstract knowledge about mental states from experience in their everyday life. In a series of experiments, we examine whether facilitating comparison across belief-related events can improve children’s ToM, as assessed by improvements on false-belief tasks. The results bear out this claim: inviting and facilitating comparison across true- and false-belief events improves children’s false-belief reasoning. Further, the results show specific signatures of analogical comparison processes, as amplified below. We also find evidence for mental-state language: children who spontaneously produced mental-state language in an elicitation task benefitted more from training than those who did not. These findings support the idea that a domain-general structure-mapping mechanism can provide young children with critical insights about the social world.

Last modified

• 01/09/2019

Creator

• Christian Hosos

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/N2ZN0R

Subject

• Psychology

Keyword

• learning
• social cognition
• cognitive development
• comparison
• analogical reasoning
• theory of mind

Date created

• 2017-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright