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Biomedical subjects

J Perner

Publications and source records attributed to J Perner.

13 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1995

Episodic memory and autonoetic consciousness: developmental evidence and a theory of childhood amnesia.

This research draws together Tulving's (1985) view on episodic memory and research on children's developing "theory of mind." Episodic memory, in its technical meaning given by Tulving, requires the autonoetic consciousness of having experienced remembered events, but developmental findings suggest that children cannot encode events as experienced before the age of about 4 or 5 years. Before this age they have insufficient understanding of what constitutes experience, specifically they do not reflect on the perceptual origin of their own knowledge. To demonstrate such a link children between 3 and 6 years were assessed for their understanding of the perceptual origin of their own knowledge on different "see-know tests," in particular a test assessing understanding that our senses inform only about certain aspects of the perceived objects. A significant association was found between passing see-know tests and free recall, which persisted even when cued recall and verbal intelligence are partialed out. These results are used to argue that between 3 to 6 years children develop the ability to remember events as experienced and that this development can explain adults' inability to have recollective experiences of childhood events before that age (childhood amnesia).

Association Learning↗
PubMed1991

Does the autistic child have a metarepresentational deficit?

This study examines the claim that autistic children lack a "theory of mind" because of an inability to metarepresent. We argue that if autistic children have a "metarepresentational" deficit in Leslie's (1987, 1988) sense of the term, then they should have difficulty not only with mental representations such as false beliefs, but also with external representations such as photographs. Autistic children's understanding of photographic representations was tested using Zaitchik's (1990) task. This task is modelled on the false belief task (Baron-Cohen, Leslie, & Frith, 1985; Wimmer & Perner, 1983) but involves "false" photographs where a photographic representation does not conform with the current state of the real world. Like Zaitchik (1990) we found that normal 3 and 4-year-olds found this task as difficult as the false belief task. In sharp contrast, however, the autistic children in our study passed the photograph task but failed the false belief task. As both tasks require the ability to decouple, this evidence challenges the view that autistic children lack "metarepresentational" ability in Leslie's sense. However, the results leave open the question of whether autistic children have a metarepresentational ability in the different sense of the term intended by Pylyshyn (1978), that is, representing the relationship between a representation and what it represents.

Autistic Disorder↗
PubMed1991

Understanding the mind as an active information processor: do young children have a "copy theory of mind"?

Most 4-, but no 3-year-olds, were able to understand the mind's active role in evaluating the truth of verbal information. They appreciated that a statement, whether true or false, will be disbelieved if the listener has existing beliefs to the contrary and that it will be believed if no such beliefs exist. Four- and 5-year-olds were equally competent in understanding the need for interpretation of pictorial material. They realized that an uninitiated person cannot make sense of a "droodle", which in itself is an uninterpretable section of a larger meaningful drawing. We discuss the impact of our findings on the question of whether children at this age entertain a copy theory of mind.

Attention↗
PubMed1989

Exploration of the autistic child's theory of mind: knowledge, belief, and communication.

26 autistic children with mental ages of 3-13 years were tested on 3 tasks that are within the capability of 3- or 4-year-old normal children. The first task tested understanding of a mistaken belief. Children were shown a typical box of a certain brand of sweets, and they all thought that it contained that kind of sweet. To their surprise, however, the box contained something else. Yet, only 4 out of the 26 autistic children were able to anticipate that another child in the same situation would make the same mistake. In contrast, all but 1 of 12 children with specific language impairment, matched for mental age, understood that others would be as misled as they had been themselves. The autistic children were also tested for their ability to infer knowledge about the content of a container from having or not having looked inside. All 4 children who had passed the belief task and an additional 4 performed perfectly, but most failed. The third task assessed children's pragmatic ability to adjust their answers to provide new rather than repeat old information. Here, too, most autistic children seemed unable to reliably make the correct adjustment. These results confirm the hypothesis that autistic children have profound difficulty in taking account of mental states.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1983

Developmental differences in encoding length series.

Children ages 6-13 and college students had to remember length relationships for 3 pairs of sticks. In one task, 4 sticks (A, B, C, D) were used and the training pairs were interlinked, i.e., A greater than B, B greater than C, C greater than D. In another task, 6 sticks were used to form 3 unrelated pairs, i.e., A greater than B, C greater than D, E greater than F. For 6-7-year-olds interlinked pairs were much more difficult to retain than unrelated pairs, whereas the opposite held true for college students. As a check on the stability of this finding, the linguistic form of questions and the number of different lengths of sticks were varied, but the same results were obtained. It is suggested that the previously observed difficulty that children encounter in learning length series in comparison to adults is not only due to a lack of motivation or attention or memory limitation but also to a difference in approach to the task.

Adult↗