Janet Astington

Janet Astington
University of Toronto | U of T · Dr. Eric Jackman Institute of Child Study

About

72
Publications
19,919
Reads
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9,918
Citations
Additional affiliations
July 2012 - present
University of Toronto
Position
  • Professor Emeritus

Publications

Publications (72)
Article
We examined the effects of epistemic verb training on preschoolers’ implicit and explicit inferences about epistemic states. Eighty-four children (mean age 3;5), who initially failed explicit measures of false-belief understanding, were trained with visual scenes of true- and false-belief. Across three training groups, linguistic input was manipula...
Article
By 18 months children demonstrate a range of social-cognitive skills that can be considered important precursors to more advanced forms of social understanding such as theory of mind. Although individual differences in social cognition have been linked to neurocognitive maturation, sociocultural models of development suggest that environmental infl...
Article
Children's ability to ascribe beliefs to themselves and others has been shown to develop in the late preschool and early school years. This ability to represent, that is to think about, beliefs known to be false is described as metarepresentational development. This article extends these findings to the domain of linguistic representations by explo...
Article
In response to Cummins's report that comments on our article (Dack & Astington, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 2011, Vol. 110, pp. 94-114), this article clarifies our perspective on what constitutes the deontic advantage, and notes similarities and differences between Cummins's perspective and our own. Like Cummins, we believe that young...
Article
The present study aimed (a) to determine whether the bilingual advantage in false-belief (FB) understanding is replicated when considering socio-economic status and (b) to assess whether conflict inhibition and/or working memory underpin the advantage, if there is one. Monolingual preschoolers (24 English monolinguals and 24 French monolinguals) an...
Article
This collection of essays presents 2 complementary perspectives on the development of children's minds: one considering the role of society in the construction of the mind; the second showing how the mind constructs itself during the course of cognitive growth. Inspired by the lifetime's work of David R. Olson, this book reviews the literature supp...
Article
Recent advancements in the field of infant false-belief reasoning have brought into question whether performance on implicit and explicit measures of false belief is driven by the same level of representational understanding. The success of infants on implicit measures has also raised doubt over the role that language development plays in the devel...
Article
Language is crucial for the theory of mind because it allows for, and indeed supports, a separation between what is real and what is hypothetical or counterfactual. Language is a medium of representation and, in simple uses, linguistic representations code perceptions. Perception fixes content and mode/attitude together. In false-belief tasks, lang...
Article
Intentions are everywhere: in action (a lover's embrace), in conversation (an unseemly comment), even on paper (the dimpled chad of a presidential election ballot). But what does it mean to say that someone has an intention? And on what basis are attributions of intention made? Drawing on literature from philosophy and psychology, this chapter defi...
Book
"Theory of mind" is the phrase researchers use to refer to children's understanding of people as mental beings, who have beliefs, desires, emotions, and intentions, and whose actions and interactions can be interpreted and explained by taking account of these mental states. The gradual development of children's theory of mind, particularly during t...
Article
It is widely accepted that adults show an advantage for deontic over epistemic reasoning. Two published studies (Cummins, 1996b; Harris and Núñez, 1996, Experiment 4) found evidence of this "deontic advantage" in preschool-aged children and are frequently cited as evidence that preschoolers show the same deontic advantage as adults. However, neithe...
Article
The concept of intention is central to human cognition and the expression of intention in language is a vital part of human communication. This study examined children's comprehension of some expressions of intention by determining their ability to choose from sets of pictures the ones that illustrated sentences which included expressions of intent...
Article
Two stages have been suggested in children's understanding of the mind between ages 4 and 8. The first stage is signalled by success on false belief tasks around age 4 and is thought to indicate an understanding of the mind as ‘representational’. The second stage is signalled by success on ambiguity tasks around age 6–8 and is thought to indicate a...
Article
Full-text available
To bridge the social-reasoning focus of developmental research on irony understanding and the pragmatic focus of research with adult populations, this cross-sectional study examines 5-, 7-, and 9-year-olds' (n = 72) developing understanding of both social-cognitive and social-communicative aspects of discourse irony, when compared with adults (n =...
Article
Full-text available
This study describes the development of social reasoning in school-age children. An irony task is used to assess 5-, 7-, and 9-year-olds' (N= 72) and adults' (N= 24) recursive understanding of others' minds. Guttman scale analysis demonstrates that in order to understand a speaker's communicative intention, a child needs to recognize the speaker's...
Article
Apprendre aux enfants à réfléchir et à exprimer leurs pensées est une fonction importance de la scolarité. De ce fait, les enseignants doivent dinger leur attention sur les processus d'élaboration et d'expression de la pensée dans le langage. Discuter de ces processus en termes spécifiques s'imposait. C'est ainsi que des termes métacognitifs et mét...
Article
Numerous studies show that children's language ability is related to false-belief understanding. However, there is considerable variation in the size of the correlation reported. Using data from 104 studies (N=8,891), this meta-analysis determines the strength of the relation in children under age 7 and examines moderators that may account for the...
Article
This chapter is an introduction to the present volume which originated in a conference that was held at the University of Toronto in April 2002. Recent work in the area has shown strong relations between children's linguistic abilities and their theory of mind. The purpose of the present volume is to thoroughly explore the role of language in theor...
Chapter
Over the past two decades, a new picture of the cognitive unconscious has emerged from a variety of disciplines that are broadly part of cognitive science. According to this picture, unconscious processes seem to be capable of doing many things that were thought to require intention, deliberation, and conscious awareness. Moreover, they accomplish...
Article
This study investigated whether exposing Kindergarten children to metacognitive language results in a greater conceptual understanding of mental states, and increased production and comprehension of metacognitive vocabulary. Over a 4-week period, parents, teachers and graduate assistants read about 70 picture books to each participant (N=48, mean a...
Article
The authors explore children's use of intention information in evaluating the moral quality of others' actions. They also address links among mental state understanding, motives-based moral reasoning, and children's own moral behavior.
Article
The author argues that the gap between theory of mind and moral reasoning research may be more apparent than real. The wider gap is between sociomoral cognitions and real-world behavior. She calls for research on the relation of children's mental state and moral understanding to their sociomoral behavior.
Article
Carpendale & Lewis's (C&L's) theory falls in with an existing set of theories that children's understanding of mind is collaboratively constructed in linguistically mediated social interaction. This social constructivist view needs to be clear about the complementary contributions of the child and of the social environment. I distinguish between th...
Article
This study reports on an analysis of the relation between kindergarten children's developing theory of mind and their understanding of characters' actions and consciousness in story narrative, based on Bruner's (1986) notion of the dual landscapes of action and consciousness. Wordless picture books were used to model these two aspects of narrative...
Article
Suggestions are made for future investigation of theory-of-mind development. There needs to be (1) more focus on the development of understanding of desire and intention; (2) research on the role of language in theory-of-mind development that integrates representational-development and social-interaction views; and (3) investigation of the real-wor...
Article
Full-text available
The study investigates the hypothesis that children's ability to attribute second-order beliefs facilitates their understanding of evidence, as seen in the ability to distinguish between causes and reasons. Seventy-four children 5–7 yr old were given belief and evidence tests. The belief tests assessed their ability to represent and reason from sec...
Article
Theory of mind (ToM) underlies the ability to attribute mental states to people as a way of understanding their social behaviour. Although ToM development is an active area of research, most empirical investigations focus on infants and young children. Accordingly, the purpose of this study is to assess ToM in preadolescents and to determine whethe...
Article
: Children's theory of mind underlies their ability to explain and predict human behavior by taking into account a person's thoughts and feelings. It develops in the first 5 years of life, beginning with joint attention in infancy. The 3-year-old child understands that there is a difference between thoughts in the mind and things in the world and i...
Article
: Children's theory of mind underlies their ability to explain and predict human behavior by taking into account a person's thoughts and feelings. It develops in the first 5 years of life, beginning with joint attention in infancy. The 3-year-old child understands that there is a difference between thoughts in the mind and things in the world and i...
Article
The aim of this study was to test two competing causal models concerning the relationship between children's social behaviors and theory of mind. Children between 3 and 4 years of age (n = 20) at the time of first testing were assessed three times over approximately 7 months. Theory of mind was assessed using false belief tasks. Children were video...
Article
Fifty-nine 3-year-olds were tested 3 times over a period of 7 months in order to assess the contribution of theory of mind to language development and of language to theory-of-mind development (including the independent contributions of syntax and semantics). Language competence was assessed with a standardized measure of reception and production o...
Article
Full-text available
Fifty-nine 3-year-olds were tested 3 times over a period of 7 months in order to assess the contribution of theory of mind to language development and of language to theory-of-mind development (including the independent contributions of syntax and semantics). Language competence was assessed with a standardized measure of reception and production o...
Article
Siegal (e. g. 1991, Siegal & Peterson, 1994) has long argued that data from conversations with young children in experimental settings must be treated with caution. If the child does not understand and share the experimenter's purpose he or she may provide irrelevant responses 卤 irrelevant, that is, to the scientific endea-vour of determining what...
Article
Over the last decade, the phrase ‘theory of mind’ has become an enormously popular one in developmental psychology. During this period it has appeared in the title of at least half a dozen books, hundreds of book chapters and journal articles, and who knows how many dissertations and university courses. However, as Nelson et al. make clear, ‘theory...
Article
Full-text available
Factors associated with individual variation in false belief understanding were examined. Sixty-eight 3- to 5-year-olds were tested on 4 standard false belief tasks. General language ability and verbal memory were found to be significant predictors of false belief understanding after the effects of age were partialled out, but nonverbal memory was...
Article
Factors associated with individual variation in false belief understanding were examined. Sixty-eight 3- to 5-year-olds were tested on 4 standard false belief tasks. General language ability and verbal memory were found to be significant predictors of false belief understanding after the effects of age were partialled out, but nonverbal memory was...
Article
explore the association between language and theory of mind, moving beyond the recent focus on the development of a theory of mind in the preschool years . . . to discuss relations among children's theories of mind, teachers' theories of children's minds, and the linguistic interactions between children and their teachers / focus is on how language...
Article
A cross-sectional, correlational study of 30 children, 3 to 5 years old, investigated relations between their theory of mind development and social interaction, controlling for age and general language ability. Children's overall performance on 4 standard false belief tasks was associated with their production of joint proposals and explicit role a...
Article
Full-text available
Bruner, in reassessing the cognitive revolution, argues for the centrality of ‘meaning-making’ in human activity, claiming that children learn to give meaning to what people do as they learn the language and social practices of their culture. The role played by the attribution of mental states to others has been studied intensely in the past decade...
Article
Speech act theory (Searle, 1969) is used to analyze the concepts for thinking about talk and thought—metalinguistic and metacognitive concepts—and the relations between them. We examine the relations between speech acts and their corresponding mental states and between speech acts linked in a discourse. We argue that interpreting the illocutionary...
Article
Tomasello, Kruger & Ratner relate the evolution of social cognition – the understanding of others' minds – to the evolution of culture. Tomasello et al. conceive of the accumulation of culture as the product of cultural learning, a kind of learning dependent upon recognizing others' intentionality. They distinguish three levels of this recognition:...
Article
[This book] surveys . . . research in developmental psychology [on the child's discovery of the mind]. Sometime between the ages of two and five, children begin to have insights into their own mental life and that of others. They begin to understand mental representation—that there is a difference between thoughts in the mind and things in the worl...
Article
3 studies investigated whether young children understand that the acquisition of certain types of knowledge depends on the modality of the sensory experience involved. 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children were exposed to pairs of objects that either looked the same but felt different, or that felt the same but looked different. In Study 1, 36 children w...
Article
Examines children's understanding of the mind, focusing on empirical evidence and explanatory theories. The key issue of children's understanding of false belief is discussed. Other evidence for children's folk psychological understanding is summarized, from late infancy to the end of the preschool period. Considering explanations, the dominant ide...
Article
distinguishing desires and outcomes / representational nature of desire (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Article
Recent examination of the effects of the role of literacy on cognition suggests that these effects cannot be tied exclusively to the acquisition of reading and writing skills. This paper advances the argument that literacy has its impact on cognition indirectly, through the invention and acquisition of a complex set of concepts, expressed in a meta...
Article
Although young children perform speech acts, they do not have a concept of the speech act that older children acquire, and they are not aware of the role that language plays in social interaction. This meta- pragmatic understanding is particularly important for the speech act of promising, since promises are self-referential. Two experiments that i...
Article
This study determined at what age and in what form children (aged 4;5 to 11;11) produce speech acts which commit them to some future action, by having them speak a doll's part in dialogues with the experimenter, who spoke for another doll. All children produced directive speech acts, indicating that the task was not too difficult for them, but only...
Article
This study determined what types of speech act 5– to 13-year-olds, and adults, would call Promising by asking questions following stories in which a speaker sometimes violated Searle's (1969) rules, by promising an event outside the speaker's control (PREDICTING) or by promising that a past action had been performed (ASSERTING). By 9 years of age c...
Article
This research concerns the development of children's understanding of representational change and its relation to other cognitive developments. Children were shown deceptive objects, and the true nature of the objects was then revealed. Children were then asked what they thought the object was when they first saw it, testing their understanding of...
Article
Full-text available
Investigated 1st-person beliefs (beliefs recognized as beliefs) in young children by studying children's concepts of seeing and knowing. 48 male and female Canadian elementary school students (aged 5, 6, and 9 yrs) were shown colored animal silhouettes that were then placed in a barn. Ss were asked to identify the animals through a window in the ba...
Article
Traducción de: The Child's discovery of the mind Incluye índice Incluye bibliografía Entre los 2 y los 5 años de edad, los niños comienzan a comprender su propia vida mental y la de los otros. La autora expone los hallazgos de la investigación y las teorías propuestas, así como las consecuencias de este descubrimiento para el desarrollo infantil, t...

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