The Social Transmission of Information About Mental States: Implications for Children's Visuospatial and Socioemotional Learning

110 pagesAcross five studies, this dissertation explores the thesis that children are sensitive to information about others’ mental states and that this sensitivity scaffolds their learning in both the physical (Chapter 1) and social (Chapters 2 and 3) domain. Chapter 1 explores the interplay between the physical and mental world during visuospatial learning. Although a 180° perspective presents the greatest visual disparity between teacher and learner, it may promote social perspective taking through face-to-face interaction and thus improve learning. Children (4-6 years) and young adults (18-27 years) observed a model open a puzzle box from a first-person (0°) or third-person (90° or 180°) perspective. Both children and adults who learned face-to-face at 180° were fastest to open the box and most likely to discover a novel solution, consistent with goal emulation. Chapter 2 explores children’s utilization of a different type of mental state — verbally shared emotions (i.e., emotion talk) — when making social affiliative decisions and their sensitivity to valence and context. Five to 8-year-olds listened to two children describe their day and then indicated their social preferences. Children preferred a child who shared a happy experience over a neutral child and a neutral child over a child who shared a sad experience. However, when the sad experience was presented within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, children’s preference for the neutral child disappeared. Chapter 3 further explores emotion talk in childhood by examining children’s developing beliefs about emotion talk. Five to 8-year-olds viewed stories in which characters did or did not engage in emotion talk. Then children guessed which story characters usually affiliated and answered questions about gender and emotion talk. Although girls’ social inferences based on emotion talk stayed constant with age, boys became less likely to associate emotion talk and friendship with age. Additionally, children who believed boys “never” talk about feelings were less likely to infer that boys who talked about feelings were friends, demonstrating a link between gender beliefs and inferences. Together these findings offer new insights into how early in development children use others’ invisible mental states to learn about the physical and social world