Facilitating Children's Understanding of Misinterpretation: Explanatory Efforts and Improvements in Perspective Taking

The authors investigated children's understanding of how mistaken beliefs can arise through misinterpretation of ambiguous information. Children (N = 91), aged 4 to 5 years, were given pre- and posttests on their ability to infer a puppet's interpretation of a restricted-view drawing after...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Journal of genetic psychology 2002-06, Vol.163 (2), p.133-148
Main Authors: Pillow, Bradford H., Mash, Clay, Aloian, Samuel, Hill, Valerie
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Beliefs
Biological and medical sciences
Child
Child development
Child psychology
Child, Preschool
Children & youth
Cognition & reasoning
Concept Formation
Control Groups
Developmental psychology
Discrimination Learning
Female
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Humans
Male
Orientation
Parenting Styles
Parents
Pattern Recognition, Visual
Perceptual Masking
Perspective Taking
Practice (Psychology)
Preschool Children
Problem Solving
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Psychophysics
Puppetry
Social Cognition
Social Influences
theory of mind
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Summary:The authors investigated children's understanding of how mistaken beliefs can arise through misinterpretation of ambiguous information. Children (N = 91), aged 4 to 5 years, were given pre- and posttests on their ability to infer a puppet's interpretation of a restricted-view drawing after the puppet had been led to an erroneous expectation about the drawing's identity. Before the posttest, the children received either self-explanation training or other-explanation training in which they explained the source of their own or a puppet's misinterpretations of drawings; a control group received no training. The children who received training improved from pre- to posttest, and those who had practiced explaining misinterpretations by referring to previously viewed pictures or to features of a target picture showed the greatest improvement. These results indicate that learning to explain misinterpretations can help children recognize situations in which misinterpretations are likely to occur.
ISSN:0022-1325
1940-0896
DOI:10.1080/00221320209598673