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2025

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A representation of Psyche, taken from the BPS logo

Alison Gopnik is Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Alison Gopnik: Parenthood

Alison Gopnik talks to Jon Sutton about the exploratory, bright butterflies that are children.

The supreme infant

Deputy Editor Annie Brookman-Byrne reports from Professor Alison Gopnik’s keynote at the British Psychological Society's online 2020 Conference.

The unique life history of humans

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Book Reviews

This is a state‐of‐the‐art review of children's understanding of the mind. It examines both empirical evidence and explanatory theories. Considering evidence, the key issue of children's understanding of false belief is first discussed. Then other evidence for children's folk psychological understanding is summarized, from late infancy to the end of the preschool period. Considering explanations, the dominant idea in the field, the ‘heory theory’, is discussed first. Then five other perspectives are considered: enculturation, nativism, folk psychology based on procedural knowledge, on experience, or on scripts. The positions, and the empirical predictions each would make, are compared. The paper concludes with a synthesis of the different views and a brief consideration of where the field is headed.

Theoretical explanations of children's understanding of the mind

Book reviews

Theorists examining children's understanding of the mind have been particularly interested in pretence as it may be a marker for early understanding of mental representation (Leslie, 1987). Although Lillard (1993a, 1996) found that children appeared not to understand that pretence involves mental representation or even the mind, Lillard and Sobel (1999) showed that for certain types of pretence, in particular, pretence involving fantasy characters, children's understanding might be more advanced. The twoexperiments here replicate andextend this finding. In both experiments, children performed better on fantasy items than items that did not involve fantasy. This was true regardless of the amount of action the pretence involved.

The impact of fantasy and action on young children's understanding of pretence

British cognitive developmental psychology is characterized by its interest in philosophical questions, its preference for linking basic research to applied issues in education and cognitive disorders, and its willingness to learn both methodologically and theoretically from work in animal psychology and in physiology more generally. It has also been influenced profoundly by Jean Piaget's cognitive stage theory although in general British work has focused on demonstrating early strengths, rather than early deficits, in infant and child cognition. Following an overview of British work that encompasses past and present interests, issues and challenges for the future are highlighted. While the perspectives of the founding members of the British Psychological Society (BPS), as outlined by Edgell (1947), are still apparent in British research in cognitive developmental psychology today, it is argued that future cognitive work must become even more interdisciplinary and that the symbiotic relationship between research in adult cognition and in cognitive development needs greater recognition.

Cognitive development: No stages please - we're British

Data from a comprehensive diary study of early lexical development were analysed to document the acquisition of colour terms and the acquisition of colour‐based subordinate object categories by one child who learned all 11 basic colour terms prior to age 2:0 years. The pattern of child colour‐term production and adult feedback for colour‐term usage was recorded beginning with the first production of a colour term. Information concerning the child's non‐linguistic knowledge of colour categories, comprehension of colour‐terms, syntactic development, acquisition of colour‐based subordinate object categories and adult strategies of introduction of colour terms and colour‐based Subordinate object categories also was available. Findings support a transactional process between this child's cognitive‐linguistic knowledge and adult input.

Transaction of cognitive-linguistic abilities and adult input: A case study of the acquisition of colour terms and colour-based subordinate object categories

Researchers who advocate the hypothesis that cognitive development is akin to theory formation have also suggested that young children possess distinct systems for explaining physical, psychological, and biological principles (see, e.g., Wellman & Gelman, 1992). One way this has been investigated is by examining how children explain human action: Children explain intentional and accidental actions by appealing to psychological principles, and explain impossible physical or biological action in terms of the underlying principles of those domains (Schult & Wellman, 1997). The current investigation examined the coherence of children's explanatory systems by eliciting explanations of possible and impossible physical, psychological, and biological events. Then, in a separate set of stories, children were asked to generate counterfactual alternatives for characters who wanted to perform an event, but did not, either because of a mishap or because the event was impossible. Overall, children were better at generating explanations for why events were impossible than recognizing that no alternative could be generated for impossible events. However, there was some evidence that children's explanatory abilities predicted whether they could correctly reject cases where no counterfactual alternative could be generated. The results lend support to the hypothesis that children's causal knowledge is coherently organized in domain‐specific knowledge structures.

Exploring the coherence of young children's explanatory abilities: Evidence from generating counterfactuals

A notable observation is the similarities in the cognitive processes of pretend play (PP) and counterfactual reasoning (CFR) as both involve thinking about alternatives to reality. It is argued by Weisberg and Gopnik (Cogn. Sci., 37, 2013, 1368) that alternative thinking in PP and CFR is underpinned by an imaginary representational capacity but few studies have empirically investigated this link. We use a variable latent modelling approach to test a hypothetical model of the structural relationship of PP and CFR predicting that if PP and CFR are cognitively similar; they should have similar patterns of associations with Executive Functions (EFs). Data were collected on PP, CFR, EFs and Language from 189 children (M = 4.8 years, males = 101, females = 88). Confirmatory factor analyses showed that measures of PP and CFR loaded onto single latent constructs and were significantly correlated (r = .51, p = .001) with each other. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses revealed that EF accounted for unique significant variance in both PP (β = 21) and CFR (β = 22). The results of the structural equation modelling revealed that the data were a good fit for the hypothetical model. We discuss the plausible role of a general underlying imaginative representational capacity to explain similarities in the cognitive mechanisms of different states of alternative thinking like PP and CFR.

A plausible role of imagination in pretend play, counterfactual reasoning, and executive functions

This paper reviews and evaluates various theories of the origins of theory of mind in infancy. In what a theory of mind consists is first considered. It is argued that any theory of mind has two important features. Firstly, a theory of mind recognizes, at least, the existence of psychological relations between agents and objects, including some relations which involve “action at a distance”. Secondly, in a theory of mind, self and other are equivalent in that both can act equally as agents of psychological relations. Any theory of the development of theory of mind must explicate how it is possible to acquire an understanding of these two features. With this requirement in mind, four main types of recent theories are considered — modularity theories, Piagetian theories, matching theories, and intersubjectivity theories. While no decision is made amongst these theories, suggestions for further improvement in theorizing on this topic are presented.

Theories of mind in infancy

Here’s what we found

Alison Gopnik: Parenthood

The supreme infant

The unique life history of humans

Book Reviews

Theoretical explanations of children's understanding of the mind

Book reviews

The impact of fantasy and action on young children's understanding of pretence

Cognitive development: No stages please - we're British

Transaction of cognitive-linguistic abilities and adult input: A case study of the acquisition of colour terms and colour-based subordinate object categories

Book Reviews

Exploring the coherence of young children's explanatory abilities: Evidence from generating counterfactuals

A plausible role of imagination in pretend play, counterfactual reasoning, and executive functions

Theories of mind in infancy