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Nobert Bischof, Department of Psychology, University of
Munich, Germany: Cognitive and socio-emotional changes
in four year olds: Are they manifestations of a common
underlying process?
Toward the end of the fourth year several seemingly
unrelated competences emerge, among them level-II perspective
taking (theory of mind), the use of a temporal buffer to
anticipate non-actual motivational states (mental time
travel), the consolidation of gender constancy, and a differentiation
of children's affective attitude toward their parents.
The symposium deals with experiments demonstrating age-independent
correlations between the features named and examines the
hypothesis that these correlations are due to a special
mechanism enabling the subject to reflect upon frames of
reference. Moreover, new methodologies in the investigation
of emotional consequences of cognitive development will
be discussed.
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Norbert Bischof, Department of Psychology, University
of Munich, Germany: Frame-of-reference awareness as
a key to the developmental changes occuring around age
four
"Frame of reference" is a construct introduced
by Gestalt theorists to account for the essentially relative
character of apparently absolute phenomena. While mostly
inconspicuous, its functioning can under certain conditions
be reflected upon. This capacity for frame-of-reference
awareness is assumed to be specifically human and owing
to a mechanism that is responsible for the synchronous
development of several seemingly unrelated cognitive
and emotional competences around age four, among them
a theory of mind. It will be argued that the adaptive
funcion of this mechanism is not primarily "common-sense
mentalism" but a new and more efficient motivational
priority management strategy.
Norbert Zmyj, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive
and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany:
Gender constancy and time comprehension in early
childhood
Gender constancy requires the concept of an identical
Self extending from the past into the future. Therefore,
the development of gender constancy and of time comprehension
should coincide. This hypothesis was tested with 53 children
aged 3 to 5 years. In the gender constancy task, participants
watched a video showing the cross-dressing of a boy and
a girl and wereasked about their beliefs regarding the
permanency of the protagonists' apparent sex changes.
Time comprehension was tested by comparing hour-glasses
of different duration. Both competences correlatedage
independently (rSpearman=.48, p<.001).
Eva-Maria Groh & Johanna Schubert, Department of Psychology,
University of Munich, Germany:
The re-organization of familiar attachment structure
in three to five year olds, as tested with a projective
doll-play technique
Following a Lewinian suggestion, we hypothesized
that frames of reference control not only perceptual,
but also affective issues, particularly children's experience
of their family "atmosphere". With frame-of-reference
awareness developing, children should realize that parental
perspectives diverge, which may cause transient uneasiness.
To test this hypothesis we invited 104 children (aged
3 to 5) to play with dolls in a three-dimensional landscape
offering ample opportunities to express social relations
through interactive and spatial behavior. A computer-based
evaluation of the play styles, validated by parental
interviews, clearly confirmed our expectation. The findings
offer an alternative to Freud's allegation of an "Oedipal" crisis.
Gregor Kappler, Department of Psychology, University of
Munich, Germany: Quantifying quality: How to teach
the computer to interpret and evaluate a projective test
"Qualitative" categorizations based on
the clinical evaluation of children's play are notoriously
nonobjective. In order to ensurewarrant that all subjectsSubjects
in the experiment reported by Groh & Schubert were
evaluated equally, without sacrificing the subtlety of
intuition, this intuition was transformed into a computer
program. First, the concrete play events were protocolled
in a syntactically simplified formal language. NextSecondly,
this protocol was evaluated by an expert system calculating
semantic fingerprints for every play. Finally, a neural
network detected patterns within these fingerprints,
thus assigning the children to psychologically meaningful
play style categories. The methodology of this procedure
will be discussed.
Doris Bischof-Köhler, Department of Psychology, Universitiy
of Munich, Germany: Perspective taking, mental time
travel, gender constancy and child-parent-relationship
in four year olds: How they connect
Three studies with 183 children (aged 3 to 5) yielded
highly significant correlations around.6 (age-independently,
.4) between the onset of theory of mind (false belief,
perspective taking), time comprehension, the ability
to delay gratification, planning for the future, gender
constancy, and socio-emotional uneasiness indicating
an alienation of the other-sexed parent. Contrary to
the present emphasis on the domain-specific modularity
of cognitive capabilities the remarkable correspondence,
both onto- and phylogenetical, of these features suggests
re-considering the existence of domain-general mechanisms.
The nature and possible evolutionary function of such
mechanisms will be discussed.
Josef Perner, Institute of Psychology, University of Salzburg, Austria: Discussant