THE GROUNDS OF CHILDREN’S THEORY OF MIND ABILITIES: LONGITUDINAL STUDIES FROM INFANCY TO PRESCHOOL YEARS

Roberta Fadda;Cristina Sechi;Laura Vismara;Sara Congiu;Loredana Lucarelli

2023-01-01

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Abstract

Introduction. Children understand others’ False Beliefs (FB) during preschool years, which is a key component of Theory of Mind (ToM). The grounds for FB understanding in infancy have been extensively investigated with a cross-sectional approach, while longitudinal studies are quite rare. Purpose. We illustrate the strength and weaknesses of a longitudinal perspective to understand the processes involved in the development of intersubjectivity from infancy to childhood. Description We analyzed the state of the art of the longitudinal studies investigating the relationship between early social abilities and FB understanding in children. The results indicated that both intention detection and joint attention abilities (JA) are associated with FB understanding. However, these results are not so straightforward since some studies didn’t find these associations. Methodologically, the studies are very different in terms of sample size, timing, measures, and main results. Moreover, longitudinal studies turn out to be quite demanding and to be exposed to several threats to their validity, like the mortality of the sample and the cohort effect. In addition, we will present data from a new longitudinal study, in which our research group studied JA in 116 children at 3, 6, 9, 15, and 18 months and their relationship with FB understanding at 5 years of age (final sample = 22 children). In line with previous studies, JA was not associated with FB understanding but with vocabulary. This study is of particular interest since considered several observational times during infancy, which is quite rare in previous studies. Conclusion. Our results indicated that longitudinal studies might be a unique way to investigate the processes involved in the development of intersubjectivity in childhood. The paucity of studies done so far, their methodological limitations, and their controversial results call for more research from a longitudinal perspective.