Abstract
Many social situations require a mental model of the knowledge, beliefs, goals, and intentions of others: a Theory of Mind (ToM). If a person can reason about other people’s beliefs about his own beliefs or intentions, he is demonstrating second-order ToM reasoning. A standard task to test second-order ToM reasoning is the second-order false belief task. A different approach to investigating ToM reasoning is through its application in a strategic game. Another task that is believed to involve the application of second-order ToM is the comprehension of sentences that the hearer can only understand by considering the speaker’s alternatives. In this study we tested 40 children between 8 and 10 years old and 27 adult controls on (adaptations of) the three tasks mentioned above: the false belief task, a strategic game, and a sentence comprehension task. The results show interesting differences between adults and children, between the three tasks, and between this study and previous research.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.
References
Binmore K. (1992) Fun and games: A text on game theory. D.C. Heath and Company, Lexington, MA
Blutner R. (2000) Some aspects of optimality in natural language interpretation. Journal of Semantics 17: 189–216
Colman A.M. (2003) Depth of strategic reasoning in games. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7: 2–4
De Hoop H., Krämer I. (2005) Children’s optimal interpretations of indefinite subjects and objects. Language Acquisition 13: 103–123
Dekker P., Van Rooij R. (2000) Bi-directional optimality theory: An application of game theory. Journal of Semantics 17: 217–242
DeVilliers J. (2007) The interface of language and Theory of Mind. Lingua 117: 1858–1878
Flobbe, L. (2006). Children’s development of reasoning about other people’s minds. M.Sc. Thesis Artificial Intelligence, University of Groningen.
Grice H.P. (1975) Logic and conversation. In: Cole P., Morgan J.L.(eds) Syntax and semantics, vol. III, speech acts. Academic Press, New York, pp 41–58
Hedden T., Zhang J. (2002) What do you think I think you think? Strategic reasoning in matrix games. Cognition 85: 1–36
Hendriks P., Spenader J. (2005/2006) When production precedes comprehension: An optimization approach to the acquisition of pronouns. Language Acquisition 13(4): 319–348
Hogrefe G., Wimmer H. (1986) Ignorance versus false belief: A developmental lag in attribution of epistemic states. Child Development 57: 567
Karmiloff-Smith A. (1992) Beyond modularity: A developmental perspective on cognitive science. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
Keysar B., Lin S., Barr D. (2003) Limits on theory of mind use in adults. Cognition 89: 25–41
McKelvey R.D., Palfrey T.R. (1992) An experimental study of the centipede game. Econometrica 60: 803–836
Mol, L., Verbrugge, R., & Hendriks, P. (2005). Learning to reason about other people’s minds. In L. Hall, D. Heylen, et al. (Eds.), Proceedings of the Joint Symposium on Virtual Social Agents (pp. 191–198). The Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour (AISB), Hatfield.
Nash J. (1951) Non-cooperative games. The Annals of Mathematics 54: 286–295
Onishi K., Baillargeon R. (2005) Do 15-month-old infants understand false beliefs?. Science 308: 255–257
Osborne M. (2003) An introduction to game theory. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Papafragou A., Tantalou N. (2004) Children’s computation of implicatures. Language Acquisition 12: 71–82
Perner J. (1979) Young children’s preoccupation with their own payoffs in strategic analysis of 2x2 games. Developmental Psychology 15: 204–213
Perner J., Ruffman T. (2005) Infants insight into the mind: How deep?. Science 308: 214–216
Perner J., Wimmer H. (1985) “John thinks that Mary thinks that. ”: Attribution of second-order beliefs by 5- to 10-year-old children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 39: 437–471
Premack D., woodruff G. (1978) Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind? Behavioral and Brain Sciences 4: 515–526
Steerneman, P., Meesters, C., & Muris, P. (2003). TOM-test (derde druk). Antwerpen: Garant.
Tager-Flusberg H., Sullivan K. (1994) A second look at second-order belief attribution in autism. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 24: 577–586
Termeer, M. (2002). “Een meisje ging twee keer van de glijbaan.” A study of indefinite subject NPs in child language. MA Thesis, Utrecht University.
Vrieling, P. (2006). Een ezel stoot zich geen twee keer aan dezelfde steen: Dutch children’s interpretation of indefinite subject NPs. MA Thesis, Utrecht University.
Verbrugge, R., & Mol, L. (2008). Learning to apply theory of mind? Journal of Logic, Language and Information (this issue). doi:10.1007/s10849-008-9067-4.
Wimmer H., Perner J. (1983) Beliefs about beliefs: Representation and constraining function of wrong beliefs in young children’s understanding of deception. Cognition 13: 103–128
Acknowledgements
We thank the children and staff of the St. Jorisschool in Heumen and the Christelijke Basisschool De Bron in Marum for their cooperation. Pauline Vrieling and Daniëlle Koks were so kind as to allow us to use their materials for our language experiment. We also thank the participants of the workshop “Formal models for real people” and two anonymous reviewers of this journal for their valuable suggestions and comments. Rineke Verbrugge gratefully acknowledges the NIAS (Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences) for awarding her a fellowship in the framework of the project ‘Games, Action, and Social Software’. Furthermore, we gratefully acknowledge the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, NWO (Grants No. 051-04-120 and 400-05-710 for Verbrugge, Grant No. 051-02-070 for Krämer and Hendriks, and Grants no. 277-70-005 and 015-001-103 for Hendriks).
Open Access
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Open Access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
About this article
Cite this article
Flobbe, L., Verbrugge, R., Hendriks, P. et al. Children’s Application of Theory of Mind in Reasoning and Language. J of Log Lang and Inf 17, 417–442 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10849-008-9064-7
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10849-008-9064-7