Toddlers' transitions on non-verbal false-belief tasks involving a novel location: A constructivist connectionist model
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Some argue that children learn a Theory of Mind (ToM), the understanding that others have mental states, at around 3.5 years. This is evidenced by their transition from failure to success on verbal false-belief tasks, when they begin to verbally predict an actress will search for a toy where she falsely believes it to be, rather than in its actual location. However, nonverbal measures have recently been used to show that children in their second year of life may already have some understanding of others' false beliefs. We present a Sibling-Descendant Cascade-Correlation neural-network model of one study that found 25-month-old toddlers correctly anticipated an actress would search according to her false belief. Networks were trained on true- and false-belief search patterns, simulating toddlers' everyday experience with true and false beliefs, and then tested on nonverbal true- and false-belief tasks involving a novel location. Networks transitioned from incorrectly predicting true-belief searches in both true- and false-belief tasks to making correct predictions in both tasks. Our model thus (1) reproduced the transition that has been observed in older children and (2) generalized its learning to a novel location. The model can be used to refine our understanding of the transitions while again demonstrating the usefulness of SDCC as an algorithm for modeling cognitive development.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".