The Child's Discovery of the Mind

By Janet Wilde Astington

Book Overview

Three-year old Emily greets her grandfather at the front door: "We're having a surprise party for your birthday And it's a secret " We may smile at incidents like these, but they illustrate the beginning of an important transition in children's lives--their development of a "theory of mind." Emily certainly has some sense of her grandfather's feelings, but she clearly doesn't understand much about what he knows, and surprises--like secrets, tricks, and ties all depend on understanding and manipulating what others think and know. Jean Piaget investigated children's discovery of the mind in the 1920s and concluded that they had little understanding before the age of six. But over the last twenty years, researchers have begun to challenge his methods and revise his conclusions. In The Child's Discovery of the Mind , Janet Astington surveys this lively area of research in developmental psychology. Sometime between the ages of two and five, children begin to have insights into their own mental life and those of others. They begin to understand mental representation--that there is a difference between thoughts in the mind and things in the world, between thinking about eating a cookie and eating a cookie. This breakthrough reflects their emerging capacity to infer other people's thoughts, wants, feelings, and perceptions from words and actions. They come to understand why people act the way they do and can predict how they will act in the future, so that by the age of five, they are knowing participants in social interaction. Astington highlights how crucial children's discovery of the mind is in their social and intellectual development by including a chapter on autistic children, who fail to make this breakthrough. "Mind" is a cultural construct that children discover as they acquire the language and social practices of their culture, enabling them to make sense of the world. Astington provides a valuable overview of current research and of the consequences of this discovery for intellectual and social development.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674116429
• ISBN13: 9780674116429
• Release Date: January 1994
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.4" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

This makes a lot of sense!

Astington asks two central questions in this book: What is the mind? and What does the mind do? In seeking to answer them, she explains how children develop their own minds and how they come to understand other people's minds. It is important that the reader recognize that Astington focuses her beliefs on an everyday, commmonsense approach to the issue of development--what she believes people naturally do. Known as the folk theory of mind, not all psychologists and philosophers support this theory. She organizes her book around three themes: topics related to the child's development of mind; chronology, focusing particularly on development between the ages of 18 months and 5 years; and theory. She interweaves these themes throughout, writing in a manner that is quite explicit and direct. Discovery of mind begins in infancy with children's ability to distinguish between people and things; they then learn to distinguish between thoughts and things, with pretend play being critical to this stage of development. Later they understand mental states or the mental representations produced by the mind. From here, these mental states are expressed through what she calls speech acts. Central to this folk theory of the mind is the assumption that people have beliefs and desires; their minds are the sum of these beliefs and desires, as well as their emotions and intentions. Lengthy discussion differentiating among these mental states and explaining their influence on the development of the mind is provided; experimental and research findings are included in this discussion. In addition, one chapter is devoted to children's acquisition of knowledge; it appears that a significant change in knowledge acquisition occurs around the age of 4 when children begin to understand that a function of the mind is to construe and interpret information. In an interesting chapter, Astington discusses autism. Finally, she presents five different viewpoints which could possibly lead to the child's discovery of mind; she, of course, emphasizes the theory she has supported throughout the book. The consequences of this discovery of mind are then provided. Again, Astington's direct manner of writing makes what could be a complex subject quite understandable.

A well-written, highly readable survey

This is a well-written, highly readable survey of recent research into children's developing understanding of minds, thoughts, desires, and beliefs. The book begins by introducing the notion of a folk theory of mind that we all tend to share in our commonsense living, along with some of the associated philosophical distinctions and terminology. Although professional psychologists and philosophers continue to question the validity of the folk theory of mind, this book focuses on how that folk theory develops during childhood. One chapter reviews relevant early development, early evidence of infants making a distinction between people and other objects in the environment and the early development of communicative interaction. Another reviews the evidence that young children distinguish between thoughts and real things and discusses the significance of early pretend play. The most central chapters of the book are then introduced by another chapter which revisits the folk theory of mind in some detail while also discussing the relationship between language, especially speech acts and the folk theory of mind: "Language works as a way of sharing our mental states because most of the time our statements express our beliefs, our requests express our desires, our promises express our intentions. Human interaction is this interaction of minds, mediated by language. Learning what is in people's minds from their language enables us to predict and explain their actions." Three chapters then review evidence about the development of understanding of desire, knowledge, and belief. Key experiments and on-going debates are described. The author believes that a representational theory of mind normally emerges at about 4 years of age, an understanding that people construct a representation of the world in their minds that governs their actions, even when it happens to be an incorrect representation. Thus one sees the emergence of deliberate efforts to manipulate those representations, deliberate deceptions and the telling of intentional lies. A more positive view of the value of understanding other's minds comes in a chapter which reviews the phenomenon of autism and its sometimes selective failure of cognitive development in this domain. A final chapter reviews nascent efforts to understand the mechanisms that generate the development of the child's theory of mind. The book concludes with what may be an excess of enthusiasm: a suggestion that schools should deliberately teach what researchers of the child's theory of mind measure. This book seems well-suited as a text for an advanced course in cognitive development. It attempts to give balanced treatment of various research contributions and theoretical positions. It gives appropriate consideration to the issue of possible cultural differences in the folk theory of mind and its development. However, the book does not confront the implications of more radically variant psycholo