The Mind's "I": Children's Conception of the Mind as an Active Agent

Henry M. Wellman · Anne K. Hickling

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Child and Animal Learning Development Philosophy and Theoretical Science Social Representations and Identity

Abstract

1 hypothesis about children's developing conception of the mind is that preschoolers are limited to an understanding that persons have internal, mental contents like thoughts and beliefs, whereas older children and adults conceive of the mind itself as an independent, active structure or processor. Adults' conception of the mind in this independent active fashion seems evident in their use of personified mental metaphor (e.g., "My mind tricked me"). 3 studies examined the development and consolidation of this active, personified view. Study 1 provided an analysis of natural language data regarding 1 child's uses of vision words such as see and look from age 2 1/2 to 8 years. We examined the child's use of such words to refer literally to perception (e.g., "I see the TV") and also to refer nonliterally to active mental processes such as comprehension and inference (e.g., "I see what you mean"). Studies 2 and 3 examined 6-, 8-, and 10-year-olds' comprehension and production of mental metaphors. In a metaphor comprehension task, we asked children to interpret personified metaphoric statements about the mind (e.g., "My mind wandered") and 3 comparison domains, mechanics (e.g., "The car is dead"), nature (e.g., "The wind is howling"), and emotion (e.g., "Her heart was smiling"). In an explanation task, we asked children to explain the processes underlying the making of both instant photos and mental images. The findings reveal a developing ability to interpret and produce statements personifying the mind and provide considerable evidence about children's movement toward a conception of the mind as an independent entity deserving reference and conceptualization in its own right.

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References

1983Beliefs about beliefs: Representation and constraining function of wrong beliefs in young children's understanding of deception 1990From Etymology to Pragmatics 1982Talking about internal states: The acquisition of an explicit theory of mind.1985The child language data exchange system 1988Young children's reasoning about beliefs 1987A folk model of the mind 1986Early Understanding of Mental Entities: A Reexamination of Childhood Realism 1991Theoretical explanations of children's understanding of the mind

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2010Disentangling Robust Developmental Constraints From the Instructionally Mutable: Young Children's Epistemic Reasoning About a Study of Their Own Design 2000Children's use of mental state information in selecting persuasive arguments.2007Developmental dynamics of metacognitive knowledge and text comprehension skill in the first primary school years 2001Metacognitive knowledge in primary grades: A longitudinal study 1999Development of intuitions about the controllability of different mental states

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