Conferencia profesor Koyasu

A unified theory of understanding the mind in young children: Perspective-taking abilities, theory of mind, and the display rules.
The professor will talk on a unified theory of understanding the mind in young children including perspective-taking abilities, theory of mind, and the display rules. Research on young children’s perspective-taking abilities began with Piaget's "three mountains task." Though this method has a productive power, I have pointed out that there is a serious limitation in the paradigm. In the "three mountains task," even if children cannot directly guess the viewpoint of a person in another position, they can solve the problem by conducting mental simulation or mental rotation. The false belief task by Wimmer & Perner (1983) gave us a more valid measure of understanding others mind. It has been pointed out that there are at least three types of perspective-taking abilities; to infer what other people see (perceptual), to infer what other people feel (affective), and to infer what other people think (cognitive). These three types of perspective-taking abilities should be integrated into a unified theory of the mind. To achieve this goal, it is essential to use three tasks which include misrepresentation of the protagonist; a false perception task, a false cognition task, and a false affection task. Here I will talk about a study of the third type.