Statements in which the resource exists as a subject.
PredicateObject
rdf:type
lifeskim:mentions
pubmed:issue
1
pubmed:dateCreated
1998-5-4
pubmed:abstractText
Building on earlier work by Pascual-Leone (1970) and Case (1985), Olson (1989; 1993) set out a theory showing how a series of incremental changes in capacity for "holding in mind" could account, in part, for children's acquisition of a theory of mind. Following Piaget (1951) infants were said to employ schemata for maintaining relations with objects and events in the presence of those events. At about 18 months children became capable of holding in mind an object so as to free the perceptual system to perceive a second object and form a relation between the two, allowing for what Piaget called the "symbolic function" and what Olson described as predication. At around 4 years, the period examined in the present study, children were said to acquire the ability to represent that predicative relation as a belief or as true or false. That was the stage at which children were said to possess a theory of mind. The present study tested the hypothesized relation between development of a theory of mind and increasing computational resources. Three-, four-, and five-year-old children's performance on a pair of theory of mind tasks was compared with that on a pair of dual processing tasks designed on the basis of Baddeley's (1986) model of working memory. The resulting correlations, as high as r = .64 between the tasks, suggest that changes in capacity to hold in mind allow the expression of, and arguably the formation of, a theory of mind.
pubmed:language
eng
pubmed:journal
pubmed:citationSubset
IM
pubmed:status
MEDLINE
pubmed:month
Jan
pubmed:issn
0022-0965
pubmed:author
pubmed:copyrightInfo
Copyright 1998 Academic Press.
pubmed:issnType
Print
pubmed:volume
68
pubmed:owner
NLM
pubmed:authorsComplete
Y
pubmed:pagination
70-83
pubmed:dateRevised
2004-11-17
pubmed:meshHeading
pubmed:year
1998
pubmed:articleTitle
The relation between acquisition of a theory of mind and the capacity to hold in mind.
pubmed:affiliation
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario M5S 1V6, Canada.
pubmed:publicationType
Journal Article