Preschool Children's Understanding of Mental Images (Metacognition).

Abstract

According to the traditional Piagetian view, young children have difficulty distinguishing their own thoughts from external reality. Recent research on the child's "theory of mind" suggests that preschool children actually have considerable knowledge about mental phenomena. This research is limited, however, because it has typically involved questioning children only about the hypothetical mental states of other people, and therefore tells us nothing about children's understanding and awareness of their own mental states. In this investigation, mental imagery was used to assess preschool children's understanding of the subjective, immaterial nature of their own mental states. In one experiment, 72 children between 3 and 5 years of age were instructed to form mental images of several common objects. They were then questioned about each image's visibility, accessibility, publicness, and whether it could be transformed mentally. The same questions were also asked about the actual objects themselves, both when visible and when out of sight under a box. Even the youngest children distinguished appropriately between mental images and physical objects, demonstrating that they understood the distinction between a thought and an object of thought. A second experiment tested preschoolers' ability to distinguish conceptually between mental and physical representations of the same object. Children's responses to questions about mental images (referred to as "pictures in your head") were compared to their responses about photographs in a closed box (referred to as "pictures in the box"). If young children recognize that mental representations are not simply inaccessible physical representations, then they should use different explanations to justify their responses to questions about mental images and inaccessible photographs, even when both are referred to as "pictures." They did so, appealing almost exclusively to the photograph's inaccessibility to explain why it could not be seen, touched, and seen by someone else. In contrast, explanations regarding mental images frequently invoked the immateriality of images or their status as mental entities, even though the adult had used no mental terms at any time during the procedure. These results extend recent research on early understanding of the mind by demonstrating that preschool children can reflect on their own mental states, have explicit understanding of the distinction between mental states and external reality, and do not systematically attribute physical properties to mental phenomena.