Theories Of Mindreading

All of us are mindreaders, in fact we do it all the time. We do not however posses any special or supernatural powers, the kind that would allow us to see into the minds of others or to hear their thoughts. Nevertheless in almost all of all of our interactions with others we are mindreading. The term ‘theory of mind’(ToM) is defined as, the ability to attribute mental states – beliefs, knowledge, intents, desires, and so on to others (Hewson,2015, p. 28), this is the mindreading that we all do. The term mindreading when used by psychologists in this sense is having the ability to understand that people have their own independent thoughts and beliefs and that these will directly affect their actions. Psychologists argue that mindreading abilities
This would show that they understand Sally believes the marble to be in the basket because that is where she left it, even though the child knows this belief to be false because they and not Sally witnessed Anne move the marble to the box. What studies using this test and variations of it found was that children under the age of 4 tend to answer incorrectly and state that Sally would look in the box, whereas children aged around 5 and over were far more likely to answer correctly that Sally would look in the basket (Hewson, 2015, p. 31). These results support the argument that mindreading abilities follow a developmental trajectory in that it would appear that the ability to understand false belief is learned by children sometime between 3 and 4 years of age. Meta-analysis of 178 studies with varying methodologies designed to test at what age children understand false belief carried out by Wellman and colleagues (2001) cited in Hewson (2015, p. 35) supports this argument by concluding that up until 4 years old children do not display an understanding of false
Both people can now see the same object but will be viewing it from a different perspective. The child is then asked questions about how each person sees the object to see if they understand that the people will see it differently due to their different viewing positions. Results noted by Apperly (2011) cited in Hewson (2015) show that many 3 year olds will fail this second test but that on the whole children do pass these visual perspective tasks at a younger age than they pass the aforementioned false belief tasks. As Hewson (2015) points out, both of these tasks suggest that younger children posses some level of mindreading ability, particularly that they can understand that other people will see and understand objects differently depending on their line of