The development of conceptual representations of mental life
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Attributions of thoughts, beliefs, desires, intentions, emotions, perceptions, and sensations are at the core of human social life—but "mental life" is a complex concept, encompassing a wide range of experiences and abilities that vary along many dimensions. This makes ordinary people's representations of mental life a fascinating case study of abstract reasoning and its development: How do children come to represent this complex conceptual space? In this dissertation I describe a series of large-scale studies designed to explore this question among children (4-9y) and adults in the modern US context, using an empirical approach that unites recent work on the "dimensions of mind perception" with rich traditions of research on the development of the animate-inanimate distinction, lay biology and psychology, and theory of mind. These studies address three ontological questions about ordinary people's representations of mental life: (1) What are the conceptual units that anchor representations of mental life at different points in development? (2) How are these conceptual units organized in relation to each other, and how does this organization change over development? and (3) How do people of different ages deploy their conceptual representations of mental life to reason about specific entities in the world—namely, animate beings vs. inanimate objects? Results suggest that, over the course of early and middle childhood, US children's representations of mental life undergo substantial development in all three of these respects. These findings have important implications for children's social cognitive development.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2019; ©2019 |
| Publication date | 2019; 2019 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Weisman, Kara Grace |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Dweck, Carol S, 1946- |
| Degree supervisor | Markman, Ellen M |
| Thesis advisor | Dweck, Carol S, 1946- |
| Thesis advisor | Markman, Ellen M |
| Thesis advisor | Gweon, Hyowon |
| Degree committee member | Gweon, Hyowon |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Psychology. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Kara Weisman. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Psychology. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2019. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2019 by Kara Grace Weisman
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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