The Role of Inference in Preschoolers' Understanding of Desire
Date
1998
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Haverford College. Department of Psychology
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Award
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eng
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Haverford users only
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Abstract
Recent research on the development of children's theory of mind, presents conflicting evidence in the domain of inference capabilities. This paper critically reviews studies on inference and general belief and desire reasoning capabilities. The present study will use a sample of 30 three- and four-year-olds to investigate children's capacity to understand and infer another person's desires based on what participants learn about this character from a short story. The results of the study will allow the experimenters to either provide support for Wellman (1990) or Moore et al. (1995), who provide conflicting results in the assessment of young children's inferencing capabilities. Our results may also provide support for a combination of these findings. We predict that our results will generally be consistent with those of Wellman (1990) and of cognitive change theory of mind.