Enabling conditions and children’s understanding of pretense Export

@article{citeulike:5734591, abstract = {Two experiments examined whether preschoolers' difficulties on tasks that required relating pretending and knowledge (e.g., Lillard, A. S. (1993a). Young children's conceptualization of pretense: Action or mental representational state? Child Development , 64 , 372–386) were due to children's inability to appreciate the causal mechanism behind enabling conditions. In Experiment 1, 4-year-olds were told about a character who knew about one kind of animal and did not know about another. The character acted in a manner consistent with both animals. Children were asked whether the character was pretending to be the animal of which he was ignorant. The character's knowledge was either represented in a generic manner (as a picture) or in a manner that suggested a particular enabling condition relation that children found accessible (as a battery, which most 4-year-olds recognize is critical for making toys work). Children were more successful at relating knowledge and pretending in the battery condition. This improvement in performance extended to another task in which children had to identify the enabling condition relation between knowledge and identification, in which there were reduced demands on the inhibitory mechanisms necessary for success. Experiment 2 found that the results in Experiment 1 were not due to demands of the procedure used in Experiment 1. These results are discussed in the context of recent theories of theory of mind that focus on the importance of causal relations among mental states.}, author = {Sobel, David M.}, citeulike-article-id = {5734591}, citeulike-linkout-0 = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2009.08.002}, citeulike-linkout-1 = {http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0010027709001863}, day = {05}, doi = {10.1016/j.cognition.2009.08.002}, issn = {00100277}, journal = {Cognition}, keywords = {dev\_psy, folk\_epistemology, folk\_psychology}, month = {September}, posted-at = {2009-10-16 17:18:05}, priority = {2}, title = {Enabling conditions and children's understanding of pretense}, url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2009.08.002}, year = {2009} }

TY - JOUR ID - citeulike:5734591 L3 - citeulike-article-id:5734591 N2 - Two experiments examined whether preschoolers’ difficulties on tasks that required relating pretending and knowledge (e.g., Lillard, A. S. (1993a). Young children’s conceptualization of pretense: Action or mental representational state? Child Development , 64 , 372–386) were due to children’s inability to appreciate the causal mechanism behind enabling conditions. In Experiment 1, 4-year-olds were told about a character who knew about one kind of animal and did not know about another. The character acted in a manner consistent with both animals. Children were asked whether the character was pretending to be the animal of which he was ignorant. The character’s knowledge was either represented in a generic manner (as a picture) or in a manner that suggested a particular enabling condition relation that children found accessible (as a battery, which most 4-year-olds recognize is critical for making toys work). Children were more successful at relating knowledge and pretending in the battery condition. This improvement in performance extended to another task in which children had to identify the enabling condition relation between knowledge and identification, in which there were reduced demands on the inhibitory mechanisms necessary for success. Experiment 2 found that the results in Experiment 1 were not due to demands of the procedure used in Experiment 1. These results are discussed in the context of recent theories of theory of mind that focus on the importance of causal relations among mental states. JF - Cognition SN - 00100277 TI - Enabling conditions and children’s understanding of pretense KW - dev_psy KW - folk_epistemology KW - folk_psychology AU - Sobel, David PY - 2009/09/05/ UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2009.08.002 ER -