Tara C. Callaghan

Synchrony in the Onset of Mental-State Reasoning Evidence From Five Cultures

Over the past 20 years, developmental psychologists have shown considerable interest in the onset of a theory of mind, typically marked by childrens ability to pass false-belief tasks. In Western cultures, children pass such tasks around the age of 5 years, with variations of the tasks producing small changes in the age at which they are passed. Knowing whether this age of transition is common across diverse cultures is important to understanding what causes this development. Cross-cultural studies have produced mixed findings, possibly because of varying methods used in different cultures. The present study used a single procedure to measure false-belief understanding in five cultures: Canada, India, Peru, Samoa, and Thailand. With a standardized procedure, we found synchrony in the onset of mentalistic reasoning, with children crossing the false-belief milestone at approximately 5 years of age in every culture studied. The meaning of this synchrony for the origins of mental-state understanding is discussed.

Early Understanding and Production of Graphic Symbols

Young childrens ability to understand and produce graphic symbols within an environment of social communication was investigated in two experiments. Children aged 2, 3, and 4 years produced graphic symbols of simple objects on their own, used them in a social communicative game, and responded to experimenters symbols. In Experiment 1 (N = 48), 2-year-olds did not effectively produce symbols or use the experimenters symbols in the choice task, whereas 3- and 4-year-olds improved their drawings following the game and performed above chance with the experimenters symbols. Ability to produce an effective graphic symbol was correlated with success on a task that measured understanding of the experimenters symbols, supporting the claim that childrens ability to produce a graphic symbol rests on the understanding of the symbolic function of pictures. In Experiment 2, 32 children aged 3 and 4 years improved their third set of drawings when they received feedback that their drawings were not effective communications. The results suggest that production and understanding of graphic symbols can be facilitated by the same social factors that improve verbal symbolic abilities, thereby raising the question of domain specificity in symbolic development.

The ontogeny of fairness in seven societies

A sense of fairness plays a critical role in supporting human cooperation. Adult norms of fair resource sharing vary widely across societies, suggesting that culture shapes the acquisition of fairness behaviour during childhood. Here we examine how fairness behaviour develops in children from seven diverse societies, testing children from 4 to 15 years of age (n = 866 pairs) in a standardized resource decision task. We measured two key aspects of fairness decisions: disadvantageous inequity aversion (peer receives more than self) and advantageous inequity aversion (self receives more than a peer). We show that disadvantageous inequity aversion emerged across all populations by middle childhood. By contrast, advantageous inequity aversion was more variable, emerging in three populations and only later in development. We discuss these findings in relation to questions about the universality and cultural specificity of human fairness.

Factors affecting children's graphic symbol use in the third year: Language, similarity, and iconicity

Abstract The question addressed in this study is whether the claim that children understand the symbolic status of pictures by the middle of their third year is an overestimate of their ability. Specifically, we asked whether children use language if possible to facilitate their performance in graphic symbolic tasks. Language (availability of verbal labels) was manipulated along with iconicity (degree of resemblance between symbol and referent) and perceptual similarity (between choice items) in a series of four experiments. Children 2.5 and 3 years old were presented with a graphic symbol for 4 s and immediately asked to choose the object depicted (referent) from two choice objects. In Study 1, degree of iconicity between picture and referent was varied and both choice objects had the same verbal label. The 2.5-year-olds failed to use any pictures or replicas as symbols. The 3-year-olds performed well with all types of symbols and better with highly iconic symbols. In Study 2, verbal label availability was manipulated by presenting choice objects having the same or different labels and by varying familiarity of labels. The 2.5-year-olds performed at chance when verbal labels were unavailable but above chance when they were available. The 3-year-olds were above chance in all conditions but performed less well when verbal labels were unavailable. Study 3 confirmed that young children use language to mediate picture symbol use. When 2.5-year-olds were provided with subordinate verbal labels in the matching task, subsequent performance was good even when choice objects had the same basic level verbal label. In Study 4, verbal label availability was contrasted with perceptual similarity between choice objects. When verbal labels could be used and choice objects were dissimilar, performance was best, and when verbal labels could not be used and choice objects were similar, it was worst. The results suggest that childrens developing understanding of the symbolic function of pictures is tenuous in the third year, and is supported by their use of verbal labels.

Emergence of Graphic Symbol Functioning and the Question of Domain Specificity: A Longitudinal Training Study

The impact of social scaffolding on the emergence of graphic symbol functioning was explored in a longitudinal training study. Links among graphic, language, and play domains in symbolic development were also investigated. The symbolic functioning of 16 children, who were 28 months at the outset of the study, was assessed in comprehension and production tasks across the three domains at monthly intervals from 28 to 36 months, and again at 42 months. Training was delivered in between monthly assessments during weekly visits. Half of the children received training, which consisted of the experimenter drawing common objects and highlighting the relation between pictures and their referents, for 16 consecutive weeks early in the study (early training, ET). The remaining half received a placebo version of training for these 16 weeks, followed by actual training for 4 weeks in the fifth month (late training, LT). After the first 4 months of training the ET group was found to have accelerated comprehension and production of graphic symbols relative to the LT group. After the fifth month, the LT group reached the same level of graphic symbol performance as the ET group. There were strong positive correlations found among graphic symbol functioning and language and play, and between play and language. These findings support the view that graphic symbolic development can be influenced by cultural scaffolding, that more extensive training is needed early rather than later in development, and that interrelationships exist among symbolic domains.

Interference and dominance in texture segregation: Hue, geometric form, and line orientation

Five experiments were designed to test whether (1) lowering the similarity of elements within a region of texture (low-similarity arrays) would interfere with texture segregation, and (2) there would be dominance of one type of property difference over another in determining an observer’s choice of boundary in two-boundary (ambiguous) displays. In Experiments 1 and 2, the interference question was assessed using stimuli formed from the dimensions hue and geometric form (circle/square or straight/curved novel shapes). The results indicated that when boundary judgments were based on form differences, segregation was significantly impaired by hue variation. However, hue segregations were not affected by form variation. In Experiments 3-5, the dominance question was examined using stimuli formed from hue and geometric form, as well as those formed from hue and line orientation (horizontal/vertical), Analyses revealed that there was no dominance of one type of property difference over another. Rather, observers’ performance was completely predicted by the relative discriminabilities of the two boundaries. These findings support Beck’s (1982) model of textural segmentation and call into question traditional notions of the preattentive stage of perceptual processing.

Cultural Variations in Children's Mirror Self-Recognition

Western children first show signs of mirror self-recognition (MSR) from 18 to 24 months of age, the benchmark index of emerging self-concept. Such signs include self-oriented behaviors while looking at the mirror to touch or remove a mark surreptitiously placed on the child’s face. The authors attempted to replicate this finding across cultures using a simplified version of the classic “mark test.” In Experiment 1, Kenyan children (N = 82, 18 to 72 months old) display a pronounced absence of spontaneous self-oriented behaviors toward the mark. In Experiment 2, the authors tested children in Fiji, Saint Lucia, Grenada, and Peru (N = 133, 36 to 55 months old), as well as children from urban United States and rural Canada. As expected from existing reports, a majority of the Canadian and American children demonstrate spontaneous self-oriented behaviors toward the mark. However, markedly fewer children from the non-Western rural sites demonstrate such behaviors. These results suggest that there are profound cross-cultural differences in the meaning of the MSR test, questioning the validity of the mark test as a universal index of self-concept in children’s development.

Traces of the artist: Sensitivity to the role of the artist in children' s pictorial reasoning

In three studies we investigated the question of whether children consider the attributes of the artist (sentience, age level, affective style, emotion) when making judgments about the traces (drawings) made by that artist. In Study 1, 2‐ 5-year-old children were asked to find pictures drawn by a machine, an adult, an older and a younger child. Results indicated that children younger than 4 years do not consider the artists’ attributes when making judgments, but 4- and 5-year-olds do. Furthermore, whereas the oldest children were adept at both machine‐ person (sentience) and person‐ person (age) contrasts, 4-year-olds succeeded only with person‐ person contrasts. In Study 2, videotaped artists displayed differences in degree of agitation (affective style) while drawing, and this attribute was manipulated in the drawing by varying line density, asymmetry, line overlap and line gap, or all four features, across stimuli. Three- and five-year-old children judged whether a calm or agitated person drew the stimuli. Findings showed that five-year-old, but not 3-year-old, children easily completed the task. In Study 3, 3-, 5- and 7-year-old children judged whether happy or sad artists made paintings of matching emotional tone. Performance on this picture judgment task was contrasted with performance on three theory of mind tasks (false belief, emotion and interpretative). The results indicated that 5- and 7-year-olds successfully judged the impact of artists’ emotions on paintings, but 3-year-olds did not. Performance on the picture task was related to that on the false belief task, but not to the emotion or interpretive tasks. Taken together, the results suggest that children’ s view of visual symbols includes a consideration of the qualities of the artist beginning around 5 years, and there appears to be a common link between judgments of the mind behind the visual symbol in the picture task and judgments of mental state reasoning in the false belief task.

Young Children's Knowledge of the Representational Function of Pictorial Symbols: Development Across the Preschool Years in Three Cultures

Three- to 5-year-old childrens knowledge that pictures have a representational function for others was investigated using a pictorial false-belief task. In Study 1, children passed the task at around 4 years old, and performance was correlated with standard false-belief and pictorial symbol tasks. In Study 2, the performance of children from two cultural settings who had very little exposure to pictures during the first 3 years (Peru, India) was contrasted with that of children from Canada. Performance was better in the Canadian than Peruvian and Indian samples on the picture false-belief task and drawing tasks but not on the standard false-belief measure. In all settings, children passed drawing and standard false-belief tasks either concurrently with, or prior to, passing the picture false-belief task. The findings suggest that childrens explicit knowledge of the representational function of pictorial symbols matures in the late preschool years and develops more rapidly in cultures that strongly promote the symbolic use of pictures early in life.

Give as I give: Adult influence on children’s giving in two cultures

Adult influence on childrens altruistic behavior may differ between cultural communities. We used an experimental approach to assess the influence of adult models on childrens altruistic giving in a city in the United States and rural villages in India. Children between 3 and 8 years of age were tested with their parents in the United States (n=163) and India (n=154). Parents modeled either a generous or stingy donation; children then performed a similar task in private. Children in both communities were influenced by the stingy model, but only children in India increased their giving after viewing a generous model. The models influence also increased with age in India. Results of a questionnaire revealed that parents in both communities believed that children learned sharing behavior from them. We consider these results in light of differences between these societies, including different socialization goals, cultural values, and content biases that may affect altruistic giving.