Children's understanding of minds in a story

A great deal of progress has been made recently in our understanding of how children go about ascribing beliefs, desires, intentions and emotions to themselves and others. These developments begin at about four years of age and continue into the early school years. The question then arise as to how they use this new knowledge in understanding the beliefs and emotions of characters in stories, especially when these characters undergo abrupt reversals of beliefs and emotions in story contexts. And how do they relate these beliefs and emotions to their own beliefs and emotions as readers or listeners to those stories? Children age 3 to 8 were given stories and asked, as each story progressed, about the mental states of protagonist and antagonist before and after the occurrence of some critical event. In one non-ironic story modelled on a task first used by Wimmer and Perner (1983), "Maxi and the chocolate," the main character, Maxi, leaves chocolate in a blue cupboard and goes out to play. Children see the the chocolate has been moved to the green cupboard, but Maxi does not possess this knowledge. Maxi then returns. Young children fail to understand that Maxi will think that the chocolate is in the original location or predict that he will be surprised upon finding no chocolate in the blue cupboard. In an ironic story, "Punch and Judy," the main character, Punch, intends to perform a nasty trick on Judy. But Judy discovers his plan and foils it. This results in Punch destroying a prized possession, his new coat. The mental states of Punch change from glee to gloom, whereas Judy's change from despair to glee. Young children mistakenly attributed sadness to Punch prior to his having knowledge that his coat was in the box; older children correctly noted his change in emotion from happiness to sadness at the time he acquires knowledge about his misdeed. Older children could understand that Judy is happy despite Punch's unpleasant discovery. Children's ascriptions of mental states to characters bore little relation to their own reports of mental states while listening to stories. The majority reported being happy throughout the reading of the story, rather than surprised, sad or disappointed. The research is directly relevant to the education enterprise because it sets up for educators the topology of competencies necessary for understanding stories. The use of stories in schools presupposes specific capacities necessary to understand stories, and it is these capacities that are outlined in the present research. The inability of young children to ascribe false beliefs to story characters may mark and characterise young children's inability to coordinate what Bruner has called a landscape of action with a landscape of consciousness (see Bruner, 1986)