Goldman (1989, 1995) challenged the theory theory’s child-as-scientist
“theory remodification” hypothesis, arguing that it seems unlikely that all 4-year-olds would be exposed to and independently construct identical and accurate theories at exactly the same time. If the concepts of folk-psychology have proved difficult for
philosophers to define, how can preschool children, as young as 4 years of age acquire a grasp for the relevant laws as proposed by the theory theory (Goldman, 1989,
1995)?
Harris (1992) has provided the most detailed developmental account of young children’s mentalising abilities, based on a simulation model. Harris (1992)
hypothesised that early prerequisite simulation processes are determined by a built-in mechanism that enables infants to use their own emotional and perceptual system to “echo” the target individual’s current perspective of the world. According to Harris (1992), such primitive simulation processes are operating in early actions of joint attention (Butterworth, 1991) and joint emotional stances (Harris, 1989). Harris (1992) proposed that, in these instances, through the utilisation of this self-knowledge, an infant constructs an “on-line” simulation, resulting in sharing of joint attention and of emotional states in the early months of life. Further, late in the first year and increasing throughout the second year of life, children begin to interpret the stance of another by running the system in an “off-line” manner. Rather than being constrained to “on-line” experience of the outputs for action, Harris (1992) maintained that “off line” processing enables the child to disengage from the decision-maker’s outcome for attribution to the target agent:
“The child attributes the stance that is being simulated to the other person, effectively coding the other as ‘looking at A” or ‘liking/wanting F ” (Harris, 1992, p215).
The emergence of acts of teasing and comforting (Harris, 1989), gaze redirection through pointing (Butterworth, 1991), and giving known-to-be desired objects (Rheingold, Hay & West, 1976) are all cited as evidence of the increasing interpretative nature of off-line simulation at this age (Harris, 1992). Around the end of the second year, and increasing throughout the third year of life, it is proposed that
children no longer rely on their own current perceptual or emotional stance toward situations for the process of mental simulation. Instead, children develop the ability to generate “pretend” or imaginary inputs for entry into the executive decision-maker (Harris, 1992). It is hypothesised that this process allows the child to be freed from his or her own current stance of the world, thus enabling the child to represent a target agent’s perspective that is different from his or her own perspective according to the pretend inputs. The “pretend” inputs contradict what the child currently understands to be true of reality, enabling him or her to disengage from the true state of affairs and reason according to an alternative perspective.
The simulation theory posits that, through increasing powers of imaginative identification, children begin to acknowledge that individuals may differ in mental stance and thus may interpret objects differently. Evidence supporting this position comes from children’s increasing ability throughout the third year to acknowledge, for example, that another may see, want, like or know something that they do not (Flavell et al., 1981; Harris, 1991; Wellman, 1990).
Harris (1996) maintained that false belief tasks are difficult for children before 4 years of age because of the complexity of the simulation required for success.
Harris (1992,1995) argued that false belief tasks serve, by their very design, to block the simulation process of using oneself as a model. That is, false belief attributions require that the child first acknowledge the idiosyncratic status of the other (i.e. a child might not want something that the other does) and then adjust the inputs
accordingly. Success on false belief tasks, then, would require that the child imagine what it is like not to know the current reality of the situation, make the relevant adjustments to the default mechanism which operates on reality as an assumption, generate a response based on the adjusted inputs and then attribute this to the target agent (Harris, 1991). From this perspective, failure on such tasks is due to the
complex nature of the required simulation, rather than a lack of ability to attribute mental states to others.
Evidence cited in support of this position comes from studies employing modified false belief tasks, in which performance has been shown to be bolstered when the solution can be generated at a level of action rather than at a propositional level. For example. Freeman, Lewis and Doherty (1994) found that children who had failed the unexpected transfer Maxi false belief task performed better when asked to
show where the protagonist would look for the displaced object. In a second study. Freeman et al. (1994) found that young children were significantly better at
responding to false belief questions pertaining to where the protagonist will look for a displaced object as opposed to where the protagonist thought object was.
Similarly, Clements and Pemer (1994) found that, while children often fail the false belief test question, their eyes tend to look in the area of the appropriate response. The findings of these investigations may suggest that children perform better at false belief attributions when the imaginative identification task demands are reduced.