CONCEPTUAL DEVELOPMENT

CONCEPTUAL DEVELOPMENT

Understanding Who or What

Understanding Why, When, and How
Many

CONCEPTUAL DEVELOPMENT: CONCEPTS

General ideas or

understandings used to
group together objects,
events, qualities, or
abstractions that are similar
in some way

UNDERSTANDING WHO OR WHAT

Dividing objects into categories

Knowledge of other people and oneself
Knowledge of living things

UNDERSTANDING WHO OR WHAT: DIVIDING OBJECTS INTO

CATEGORIES

Dividing the objects children encounter in the world into

categories helps children answer two questions:

What kinds of things are there in the world?
How are those things related to each other?

UNDERSTANDING WHO OR WHAT: DIVIDING OBJECTS INTO

CATEGORIES
Young children attempt to divide the objects they perceive in

three general categories

Inanimate objects
People
Living things

Children divide objects into category hierarchies (i.e.,

categories related by set-subset relations)

DIVIDING OBJECTS INTO CATEGORIES: CATEGORIZATION OF

OBJECTS IN INFANCY
Infants form categories of objects in the first months of life
A key element in infants' thinking is perceptual categorization
As children approach their second birthday:
Increasingly categorize objects on the basis of overall shape
Form categories on the basis of function
Use their knowledge of categories to determine which actions go

with which type of objects

OBJECT HIERARCHIES

DIVIDING OBJECTS INTO CATEGORIES: CATEGORIZATION OF

OBJECTS BEYOND INFANCY

As children move beyond infancy, their ability to categorize

expands greatly.
This involves knowledge of relations among categories:
Increased understanding of category hierarchies
Increased understanding of causal connections

DIVIDING OBJECTS INTO CATEGORIES: CATEGORIZATION OF

OBJECTS BEYOND INFANCY

Category hierarchies often include three main levels:

General, the superordinate level
Very specific, the subordinate level
One in between, the basic level

KNOWLEDGE OF OTHER PEOPLE AND ONESELF

Children as young as 3 years have a nave psychology that

involves a commonsense level of understanding of other

people and oneself.
Properties of nave psychological concepts
They refer to invisible mental states.
The concepts are all linked to each other in cause-effect relations.

KNOWLEDGE OF OTHER PEOPLE AND ONESELF: INFANTS'

NAVE PSYCHOLOGY
Infants find people interesting, pay careful attention to them,

and learn an impressive amount about them in the first year.

In the first half of the second year, toddlers begin to show a
grasp of several ideas that are crucial for psychological
understanding.
Intention
Joint attention
Intersubjectivity

KNOWLEDGE OF OTHER PEOPLE AND ONESELF: THEORY OF

MIND
A theory of mind is a well-organized understanding of how the

mind works and how it influences behavior.

Two-year-olds: Understand the connection between other people's

desires and their specific actions, but show little understanding

that beliefs are also influential
Three-year-olds: Understand that desires and beliefs affect
behavior, but have difficulty with false-belief problems
Five-year-olds: Find false-belief problems very easy

DEVELOPMENT BEYOND INFANCY: EXPLAINING THE

DEVELOPMENT OF THEORY OF MIND
Nativist
There is a
theory-of-mind
module
(TOMM), a
hypothesized
brain
mechanism
devoted to
understanding
other human
beings.

Empiricist
Interactions
with other
people are
crucial for
developing
theory of mind.

Empiricist with
general
informationprocessing skills
General
informationprocessing
skills are
necessary for
children to
understand
people's minds.

AUTISM AND FALSE-BELIEF TASKS

Children with autism continue to find false-belief tasks very

difficult to solve even when they are teenagers.

They have impaired mind reading mechanisms, and this deficit

interferes with many aspects of their social functioning.