Journal article
Adding sound to theory of mind: Comparing children’s development of mental-state understanding in the auditory and visual realms
Journal of experimental child psychology, v 164
Dec 2017
PMID: 28818286
Abstract
•Five novel tasks were crafted to assess theory-of-mind skills in the auditory realm.•Theory-of-mind skills were significantly affected by age and gender, but not modality.•Our auditory tasks represent a scalable set of emerging theory-of-mind skills.
Theory of mind (ToM) gradually develops during the preschool years. Measures of ToM usually target visual experience, but auditory experiences also provide valuable social information. Given differences between the visual and auditory modalities (e.g., sights persist, sounds fade) and the important role environmental input plays in social-cognitive development, we asked whether modality might influence the progression of ToM development. The current study expands Wellman and Liu’s ToM scale (2004) by testing 66 preschoolers using five standard visual ToM tasks and five newly crafted auditory ToM tasks. Age and gender effects were found, with 4- and 5-year-olds demonstrating greater ToM abilities than 3-year-olds and girls passing more tasks than boys; there was no significant effect of modality. Both visual and auditory tasks formed a scalable set. These results indicate that there is considerable consistency in when children are able to use visual and auditory inputs to reason about various aspects of others’ mental states.
Metrics
Details
- Title
- Adding sound to theory of mind: Comparing children’s development of mental-state understanding in the auditory and visual realms
- Creators
- Anita A Hasni - Department of Psychology, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA 30303, USALauren B Adamson - Department of Psychology, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA 30303, USARebecca A Williamson - Department of Psychology, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA 30303, USADiana L Robins - A. J. Drexel Autism Institute, Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA
- Publication Details
- Journal of experimental child psychology, v 164
- Publisher
- Elsevier
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- A.J. Drexel Autism Institute
- Web of Science ID
- WOS:000411776600017
- Scopus ID
- 2-s2.0-85033373407
- Other Identifier
- 991014877982504721
InCites Highlights
Data related to this publication, from InCites Benchmarking & Analytics tool:
- Collaboration types
- Domestic collaboration
- Web of Science research areas
- Psychology, Developmental
- Psychology, Experimental