Mechanisms of belief-desire reasoning

理解他人和参与社会互动都依赖于对信仰、欲望和其他精神状态进行推理的能力。例如，要理解我的朋友为什么在冰箱里找，如果我认识到她想要一个橙子，并且她相信冰箱里有橙子，这将会有所帮助。小孩子通常很难推断出别人相信什么。当孩子们对与自己不同的信仰进行推理时，这种困难尤其明显。这项拟议的研究考察了允许儿童推理并了解人们的信仰和欲望的认知系统。拟议中的研究还将检验成年人如何对信仰和欲望进行推理。拟议研究的重点将是我们控制自己对他人信仰和欲望的想法的能力。这种能力在年幼的孩子身上可能还不成熟，导致他们很难克服一种倾向，即认为其他人和他们有共同的信仰。这种能力在年龄较大的儿童中得到更好的发展，但在复杂的情况下仍可能受到挑战。拟议的研究将解决的问题包括：关于信仰和欲望的想法是否受到控制其他类型思想的相同系统的控制？仅仅是成年人比孩子更擅长对信仰和欲望进行推理，还是儿童和成年人在对精神状态进行推理方面存在其他差异？为什么年纪较小的孩子如此倾向于认为别人和他们有同样的信仰？这项拟议的研究将提高我们对儿童如何推理和学习别人的想法和需求的理解。这项研究可能会揭示儿童和成人思维方式的惊人差异。从长远来看，这项研究将增加我们对儿童在社会推理方面面临的挑战的理解。

Understanding people and engaging in social interactions both depend on the ability to reason about beliefs, desires, and other mental states. For example, to understand why my friend is looking in the fridge, it will help if I recognize that she desires an orange, and that she believes that there are oranges in the fridge.    Young children often have difficulty reasoning about what other people believe. This difficulty is especially apparent when children reason about beliefs which differ from their own. The proposed research examines the cognitive systems that allow children to reason and learn about people's beliefs and desires. The proposed research will also examine how adults reason about beliefs and desires.    The focus of the proposed research will be our ability to control our thoughts about what other people believe and desire. This ability may be immature in younger children, leading them to have difficulty overcoming a tendency to assume that other people share their beliefs. The ability is better developed in older children, but may still be challenged in complicated situations.    Questions to be addressed by the proposed research will include: Are thoughts about beliefs and desires controlled by the same system(s) involved in controlling other types of thought? Are adults simply better than young children at reasoning about beliefs and desires, or are there other differences between how children and adults reason about mental states? Why are younger children so tempted to assume that others share their beliefs?    The proposed research will improve our understanding of how children reason and learn about what others think and want. The research may uncover surprising differences between how children and adults think. In the longer term, this research will increase our understanding of the challenges children face in social reasoning.