Angeline Lillard, Ph.D. - US grants

This research aims to further our understanding of how knowledge about the mind develops by investigating five hypothesized acquisitions in children's understanding of the mental state of pretend. Knowledge about the mind is important because it is at the crux of all our social interactions. Our every promise, argument, and assertion is based on the premise that others have minds with which they take in and interpret information. As adults we are so facile with this knowledge that we usually take it for granted, but how it is acquired is not at all obvious. A systematic study of the child's developing comprehension of pretend should be very useful in promoting our understanding of this domain. The mental state of pretend was chosen for this case study because it is of special interest to theorists in this area. Some, for example, have claimed it is the process in which understanding mental representation is first manifest; others have claimed it is the main tool with which social cognitive knowledge is acquired. The proposed research involves conducting a series of cross-sectional experimental studies to test the following five developments in preschoolers' understanding of pretend: (1) that pretend is the province of animate but not inanimate objects; (2) that pretend is intentional in the sense of "done on purpose"; (3) that pretend involves the brain; (4) that mental representation is necessary for pretend; (5) that mental representation is in most cases sufficient for pretend, such that no external manifestation of pretend is required. Note that these proposed acquisitions could be applied to many other mental states as well. However, this is certainly not an exhaustive list of all there is to be learned about pretend nor about mental states generally. These particular developments were chosen because they figure prominently in the existing literature on children's mental state understanding, and yet no systematic investigations have been done charting their acquisition in a single mental state. This area of investigation is relevant to children's health in at least two domains. First, understanding the mind is vital to all our social interactions, and knowing what children understand at different ages is important to clarifying our expectations of them, understanding their vulnerabilities to deception, and so on. A second health-related application of this work concerns autistic children, who have been shown to do very poorly on several tasks entailing a theory of mind. A better understanding of the normal course of understanding mental states like pretend should provide information that will be useful to deciphering the problems underlying autism.

The research is a continuation of work begun under a National Institutes of Health grant to Dr. Lillard to examine young children's understanding of pretense. This issue has recently become of critical interest in the realm of early social understanding, as many think pretending might be the venue by which understanding the mind proceeds. Dr. Lillard's past work suggests that children do not in fact have a good grasp of the mental underpinnings of pretense, whereas some very recent work coming from other laboratories suggests perhaps they do. The four research studies being carried out are designed to address these discrepancies. The interactive activities include a speaker series bringing five top women psychologists to the department, and a discussion series for women graduate students addressing professional development issues pertinent to women in psychology. Dr. Lillard will also run a graduate level seminar on pretend play and understanding the mind.

DESCRIPTION: Cognitive systems are representational devices, evolved to perceive the world as it usually is in the organism's natural environment. In light of this, pretend play is a very interesting activity. In pretense, the child's cognitive system purposefully thwarts reality, perceiving it as other than it actually is. Pretending is a ubiquitous activity of childhood, and at least in our own culture, parents pretend in front of children even at one year of age. The question posed in this research is why young children do not become terribly confused by pretense events. This question can be addressed at two levels. One level is what are the cognitive mechanisms that allow the child to thwart reality in this way. The second is how the child knows when to engage those mechanisms in a pretense interpretation. This research is aimed at the second question, but may shed light on the first one. The assumption is that young children somehow know to interpret pretense events as a special category, different from what is real, because certain behavioral regularities accompany pretense acts, and serve to signal to young children, "This is pretense." Those regularities may include special smiles, exaggerated, truncated, or oddly timed gestures, special linguistic forms, and special non-language sounds. This research compares parent's enactments of an event (having a snack of cereal and water) in pretense and real versions for detailing of behavioral regularities that differ in pretense events. Further experiments examine the generalizability of these regularities across acts (other types of pretense, teaching, and attention-getting), settings (home versus laboratory), addressees (of different ages), and pretenders (of different ages and genders). A second series of experiments addresses the issue of pretense comprehension in the face of all or a subset of these behavioral regularities. The work is important to our knowledge of how children construe the social world and the ubiquitous activity of pretend play. Because children with autism do not engage in spontaneous pretense, it may be useful in understanding autism as well.

Children are exposed to huge amounts of media -- the average child watches 32 hours of television and videos per week, in addition to playing video games and reading books. This media activity to some degree supplants the age-old childhood staple of pretend play. Yet little is known about how any of these activities impact children, and how the impacts compare among the different activities. How much and in what ways does participation in fictional worlds change children? The existing literature does offer a few suggestions. For example, children who watch violent acts on television are apt to imitate those acts, and very young children who watch more aggressive and entertainment-focused (non-educational) television are more apt to have attention problems later in life. On the positive side, children who watch more educational television have more positive outcomes in terms of language and school success. But how exactly does this work, given that children distinguish pretense and reality fairly well from an early age? Why doesn't the fictional world stay a world apart? And what are the extents of influence -- if television with aggressive content leads children to be more aggressive, does television with prosocial content lead them to be kinder? This research will examine how television, books, other media, and pretend play impact children, for better or for worse, and how the impacts differ when children encounter similar experiences in real life. It will focus particularly on three areas of potential impact: social behavior; executive function (their capacities for self-regulation, inhibitory control, and problem solving, for example); and attitudes towards people of different ethnic backgrounds. Children will be given pre-tests, then will be exposed to the fictional situation for a fixed amount of time, and finally will be given post-tests to measure the impacts of the situation.

The significance of this project lies in its contribution to a better understanding of how fiction influences children, with an eye to creating and advising parents on more positive fictional experiences for children's development. For example, in a pilot study, the PI found that watching just 9 minutes of the most popular television show today for children ages 2 to 11 lowered 4-year-olds' ability to self-regulate and delay gratification considerably, as compared to drawing or watching a different television show. It is vital that parents understand the influences such experiences have both immediately and over the long term. This research will help clarify our understanding so that parents and others working with children can make wiser choices about their children's fiction-related activities.