Belief and Counterfactuality: A teleological theory of belief attribution

The development and relation of counterfactual reasoning and false belief understanding were examined in 3- to 7-year-old children (N=75) and adult controls (N=14). The key question was whether false belief understanding engages counterfactual reasoning to infer what somebody else falsely believes. Findings revealed a strong correlation between false belief and counterfactual questions even in conditions in which children could commit errors other than the reality bias (rp=.51). The data suggest that mastery of belief attribution and counterfactual reasoning is not limited to one point in development but rather develops over a longer period. Moreover, the rare occurrence of reality errors calls into question whether young children's errors in the classic false belief task are indeed the result of a failure to inhibit what they know to be actually the case. The data speak in favour of a teleological theory of belief attribution and challenges established theories of belief attribution

Basic Conditional Reasoning: How Children Mimic Counterfactual Reasoning

Children approach counterfactual questions about stories with a reasoning strategy that falls short of adults’ Counterfactual Reasoning (CFR). It was dubbed “Basic Conditional Reasoning” (BCR) in Rafetseder et al. (Child Dev 81(1):376–389, 2010). In this paper we provide a characterisation of the differences between BCR and CFR using a distinction between permanent and nonpermanent features of stories and Lewis/Stalnaker counterfactual logic. The critical difference pertains to how consistency between a story and a conditional antecedent incompatible with a nonpermanent feature of the story is achieved. Basic conditional reasoners simply drop all nonpermanent features of the story. Counterfactual reasoners preserve as much of the story as possible while accommodating the antecedent

Helping as an early indicator of a theory of mind: Mentalism or Teleology?

This article challenges Buttelmann, Carpenter, and Tomasello’s (2009) claim that young children’s helping responses in their task are based on ascribing a false belief to a mistaken agent. In the first Study 18- to 32-month old children (N = 28) were more likely to help find a toy in the false belief than in the true belief condition. In Study 2, with 54 children of the same age, we assessed the authors’ mentalist interpretation of this result against an alternative teleological interpretation that does not make this assumption of belief ascription. The data speak in favor of our alternative. Children’s social competency is based more on inferences about what is likely to happen in a particular situation and on objective reasons for action than on inferences about agents’ mental states. We also discuss the need for testing serious alternative interpretations of claims about early belief understanding

Counterfactual Reasoning: Sharpening Conceptual Distinctions in Developmental Studies

ABSTRACT-Counterfactual reasoning (CFR)-mentally representing what the world would be like now if things had been different in the past-is an important aspect of human cognition and the focus of research in areas such as philosophy, social psychology, and clinical psychology. More recently, it has also gained broad interest in cognitive developmental psychology, mainly focusing on the question of how this kind of reasoning can be characterized. Studies have been inconsistent in identifying when children can use CFR. In this article, we present theoretical positions that may account for this inconsistency and evaluate them in the light of research on counterfactual emotions

Young children’s protest: what it can (not) tell us about early normative understanding

In this paper we address the question how children come to understand normativity through simple forms of social interaction. A recent line of research suggests that even very young children can understand social norms quite independently of any moral context. We focus on a methodological procedure developed by Rakoczy et al., Developmental Psychology, 44, 875-881, that measures children's protest behaviour when a pre-established constitutive rule has been violated. Children seem to protest when they realize that rule violations are not allowed or should not have happened. We point out that there is more than one possible explanation for children's reactions in these studies. They could be due to disobeying an authority, an inability to follow a rule, or the violation of an empirical expectation due to the mismatch between statement and action. We thus question whether it would still count as an indicator for normative understanding if children responded to aspects of the game other than the violation of a constitutive rule and conclude that the protesting behavior, when taken in isolation, does not suffice as evidence for normative understanding

Extended difficulties with counterfactuals persist in reasoning with false beliefs: Evidence for Teleology-in-Perspective

Increasing evidence suggests that counterfactual reasoning is involved in false belief reasoning. Because existing work is correlational we developed a manipulation that revealed a signature of counterfactual reasoning in participants’ answers to false belief questions. In two experiments we tested 3- to 14-year-olds and found high positive correlations (r = .56 and r = .73) between counterfactual and false belief questions. Children were very likely to respond to both questions with the same answer, also committing the same type of error. We discuss different theories and their ability to account for each aspect of our findings and conclude that reasoning about others’ beliefs and actions requires similar cognitive processes as using counterfactual suppositions. Our findings question the explanatory power of the traditional frameworks, theory theory and simulation theory, in favour of views that explicitly provide for a relationship between false belief reasoning and counterfactual reasoning

Extended difficulties with counterfactuals persist in reasoning with false beliefs: Evidence for Teleology-in-Perspective

Increasing evidence suggests that counterfactual reasoning is involved in false belief reasoning. Because existing work is correlational we developed a manipulation that revealed a signature of counterfactual reasoning in participants’ answers to false belief questions. In two experiments we tested 3- to 14-year-olds and found high positive correlations (r = .56 and r = .73) between counterfactual and false belief questions. Children were very likely to respond to both questions with the same answer, also committing the same type of error. We discuss different theories and their ability to account for each aspect of our findings and conclude that reasoning about others’ beliefs and actions requires similar cognitive processes as using counterfactual suppositions. Our findings question the explanatory power of the traditional frameworks, theory theory and simulation theory, in favour of views that explicitly provide for a relationship between false belief reasoning and counterfactual reasoning

The Developmental Research Team at the University of Stirling explain why they love their psychology kindergarten

First paragraph: In the Division of Psychology at the University of Stirling, we regard our onsite kindergarten as one of our greatest assets. However, when we say this to others, we are used to encountering reactions that range from incredulity or uneasiness to plain bewilderment. Some assume that we maintain the kindergarten to provide a childcare facility for staff. Others, who understand that the primary function of the kindergarten is to facilitate our research and research-led teaching, seem to think that the childcare experience itself might be somehow compromised by this goal. Readers may be relieved to hear that we don’t keep the children under strictly controlled conditions, austere and isolated, like bacteria in a petri dish. But we decided that it was time that we put the record straight more broadly

The first year in formal schooling improves working memory and academic abilities

Neurocognition and academic abilities during the period of 4 and 7 years of age are impacted by both the transition from kindergarten to primary school and age-related developmental processes. Here, we used a school cut-off design to tease apart the impact of formal schooling from age, on working memory (WM) function, vocabulary, and numeracy scores. We compared two groups of children with similar age, across two years: first-graders (FG), who were enrolled into primary school the year that they became eligible and kindergarteners (KG), who were deferred school entry until the following year. All children completed a change detection task while brain activation was recorded using portable functional near-infrared spectroscopy, a vocabulary assessment, and a numeracy screener. Our results revealed that FG children showed greater improvement in WM performance and greater engagement of a left-lateralized fronto-parietal network compared to KG children. Further, they also showed higher gains in vocabulary and non-symbolic numeracy scores. This improvement in vocabulary and non-symbolic numeracy scores following a year in primary school was predicted by WM function. Our findings contribute to a growing body of literature examining neurocognitive and academic benefits conferred to children following exposure to formal schooling

Little Scientists – Big Impact

First paragraph: In the Division of Psychology at the University of Stirling, we regard our onsite kindergarten as one of our greatest assets. However, when we say this to others, we are used to encountering reactions that range from incredulity or uneasiness to plain bewilderment. Some assume that we maintain the kindergarten to provide a childcare facility for staff. Others, who understand that the primary function of the kindergarten is to facilitate our research and research-led teaching, seem to think that the childcare experience itself might be somehow compromised by this goal. Readers may be relieved to hear that we don’t keep the children under strictly controlled conditions, austere and isolated, like bacteria in a petri dish. But we decided that it was time that we put the record straight more broadly