CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2025
| Author | Fischer, Paula |
|---|---|
| Title | Efficient Mindreaders: Flexible belief reasoning and updating in children |
| Summary | Abstract Human social life highly depends on our ability to comprehend other minds. Theory of Mind (ToM) refers to the ability to make inferences about others’ mental states, allowing us to predict and explain others’ behaviour. While even infants and young children show some understanding of other people’s mental states, it is still unclear how rich their representational capacities are, and furthermore, what processes allow them to revise and update their own belief and those attributed to others in case of an event or information that is inconsistent with their previously acquired knowledge. The first objective of this thesis is to investigate whether young children’s belief attribution ability is flexible enough to operate in various scenarios, similarly to adults. We specifically ask whether they can attribute beliefs contents to others that they can entertain in first person: i.e., beliefs about tool efficiency and causal events. In our first study, we show that children already by their third year of age are able to integrate efficiency information in false belief reasoning: they successfully predict an agent’s action based on his false belief about the efficiency of a tool. The second objective of the thesis is to address children’s belief revision strategies. As children rapidly learn new information, and sometimes new information can contradict with their previous beliefs about the world, the question emerges how they maintain consistency. Evidence from studies with adults using conditional premises suggests that adults prefer to keep the observed data and update the conditional rule when encountering new and conflicting information, but little is known how young children deal with such inconsistencies, and whether their strategies are different in first person and third person belief revision. In this line of study, we find that 5-year-old children, similarly to adults, are more likely to revise a rule and preserve the observed data, but only in case the rules are not constrained, and not for rules that are subject 3 to physical constraints. However, this is different when children are required to update a belief about constrained rules attributed to an agent: in this case, children also become more likely to update the rule itself and retain the data. We argue that as the representation of relational contents is likely to be more complex, and thus more fragile, children are more likely to update it in case of conflicting information. Together these findings suggest that children possess sophisticated abilities to represent others’ beliefs: similarly, to adults, they are able to integrate contents that they can understand in first person when they are reasoning about someone’s beliefs. Moreover, when they are learning about the world, and acquire beliefs about contingencies or rules, they reorganize their belief sets in a consistent manner, similarly to adults, when they face counterevidence. |
| Supervisor | Téglás Ernő, Kovács Ágnes Melinda |
| Department | Cognitive Science PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2025/fischer_paula.pdf |
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