Browsing by Subject "Theory of Mind"

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    The cognitive effects of bilingualism: does knowing two languages impact children’s ability to reason about mental states?
    (2010-04) Millett, Katherine Ruth Gordon
    In a number of studies, bilingual children have been shown to outperform monolingual children in false belief tasks, thus providing evidence that bilingualism affects children's ability to reason about the mental states of others. However, there are two limitations to this past work. The first limitation is that false belief tasks only measure a limited aspect of children's mental state reasoning abilities. Thus, performance in false belief tasks cannot be assumed to reflect a general ability to reason about the mental states of others. Secondly, the language skills of the bilingual groups included in this past work were only reliably measured in one language. Thus, we do not have a good understanding of how language proficiency across both languages impacts mental state reasoning abilities. In order to address these limitations, 3- to 5-year-old Spanish-English bilingual children and English monolingual children were tested using Wellman and Liu's (2004) scale which assesses a variety of aspects of mental state reasoning. The scale includes the following tasks: a Diverse Desires task, a Diverse Beliefs task, a Knowledge Access task, a Contents False Belief task, an Explicit False Belief task, a Belief-Emotion task, and a Real-Apparent Emotion task. Additionally, the language proficiency of the bilingual group was measured in both English and Spanish using standardized measures of vocabulary comprehension (the PPVT and the TVIP). Results indicate that when English vocabulary level was controlled, the bilingual children outperformed the monolingual children in the Diverse Desires task. Furthermore, effect sizes suggest that the bilingual children also outperformed the monolingual children in the Knowledge Access, Belief-Emotion, and Real-Apparent Emotion tasks when English vocabulary level was controlled. Overall, these findings provide evidence that bilingualism contributes to a broader effect on mental state reasoning than has been previously found.
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    What matters more—the ‘literariness’ of a story, or what a reader thinks it is? Exploring the Influence of Genre Expectations on Transportation and Empathy
    (2017-05) Van Gilder, Jessica
    As a tool for understanding, narrative is fundamental to human cognition. A wealth of theory and growing empirical evidence strongly indicate that reading a narrative activates a simulation with critical cognitive and emotional components. Importantly, these components have been linked to prosocial outcomes, such as empathy and transportation. While there is growing experimental support that reading narratives entails a simulated experience that involves transportation, the conditions under which reading leads to improvements in empathy remains understudied. This thesis applies a cognitive and narrative based approach in order to ask: What matters more? “Literary” features of a text, or the genre expectation a reader brings into a text? To answer this question, this thesis examines whether genre expectations and text genre—in combination or independently—influence participants’ empathy, transportation and comprehension. Overall, the results of two experiments bring to light the role of genre expectation in processing fiction and nonfiction texts and suggest genre expectation is an important factor that future studies should take into account when investigating the reading experience. By considering the study results in the framework of narratology, this thesis also addresses the theoretical foundations of the division between fiction and nonfiction. Specifically, this project reflects on the implications of how and why the reader’s use of disbelief has changed since the novel’s arrival due to the increasingly blurred boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, and their respective claims to truth.