Action, Consciousness and Theory of Mind: Children S Ability To

Action, Consciousness and Theory of Mind: Children’s Ability to Coordinate Story Characters’ Actions and Thoughts

Janette Pelletier and Janet Wilde Astington Revised & Resubmitted June 2003

Department of Human Development and Applied Psychology Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto jpelletier @oise.utoronto.ca [email protected]

Address for correspondence: Institute of Child Study, Department of Human Development and Applied Psychology, OISE/UT, 45 Walmer Road, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5R 2X2 Action, Consciousness and Theory of Mind: Children’s ability to coordinate story characters’ actions and thoughts

Abstract

This study reports on an analysis of the relation between kindergarten children’s developing theory of mind and their understanding of characters’ actions and consciousness in story narrative, based on Bruner’s (1986) notion of the dual landscapes of action and consciousness. Wordless picture books were used to model these two aspects of narrative through the direct portrayal of action and thought by way of thought bubbles and adults’ explicit metacognitive talk. Children were asked to retell stories following both an experimenter’s and the teacher’s initial storytelling. Children’s ability to coordinate story characters’ thoughts, beliefs and intentions (consciousness) was measured by the frequency of reference to both the character’s action or presence and the content of his/her thought bubbles in the stories. Results of the analyses revealed relations among children’s age, language ability, non-verbal intelligence, theory of mind development, and their ability to coordinate consciousness and action in the stories. Younger children who have less developed theory of mind more often retold just the action in the real world without reference to thought, or else described the scene depicted within the thought bubble without reference to the character who held the thought. Implications for education, such as teaching children to talk about the mind, are discussed.

Action, Consciousness and Theory of Mind: Children’s Ability to Coordinate Story Characters’ Actions and Thoughts

Children’s “theory of mind” has received considerable attention by developmental psychologists over the past 15 years; it has described children’s growing awareness of mental events, from the time they first know that they and others have thoughts, to much later developmental achievements, for instance, being able to understand embedded thinking such as “he knows that she knows that they know...” (Astington, Harris & Olson, 1988; Astington, 1993). Empirical work in children’s theory of mind continues to inform us about what children know about the mind and how they talk about it (Astington, 1993; Bartch & Wellman, 1995; Flavell, Green & Flavell, 1995). Most of the research in theory of mind has relied on experimental methodology, based in part on the original “false belief” task (Wimmer & Perner, 1983), rather than on real-world observations, to assess children’s understanding of their own and others’ mental activities. Here the experimental paradigm is most useful in giving us some standard measure of “evidence” about children’s thinking about thinking. Children who have achieved this development know that people behave in certain ways based on what they think to be true. In a typical false belief task, a child is told a simple story, acted out with dolls, for example: “This boy has a ball. He puts it in his toy box and goes out to play. While he is gone, his sister takes the ball out of the toy box and puts it in the closet, then the sister leaves. The boy comes back to get his ball.” The child is asked, “Where will the boy look for the ball?” Children who pass this task understand that the boy thinks the ball is in the toy box and therefore he will look for it in the toy box. Children who fail this task do not take into consideration where the boy thinks the ball is; rather, these children say he will look for the ball in the closet (because that is where the ball really is). Remarkably consistent across studies is the finding that this “theory of mind” ability is strongly age-related and emerges between 4 and 5 years. Three-year- olds are quite predictable in making the false belief error, suggesting a conceptual deficit in their understanding of false beliefs (Perner, Leekam & Wimmer, 1987). There has been some work to suggest that 3-year-olds’ poor performance on false belief tasks is related to the structure of their event memories, and that given repeated training on false belief stories, their performance can improve (Lewis, Freeman, Hagestadt & Douglas, 1994). Since the time of the original Wimmer and Perner task, researchers have gone on to develop myriad variations and extensions of the original false belief story. For example, work by Gopnik and Astington (1988) showed that young children not only make errors in understanding another’s belief, but also make errors in understanding their own mistaken beliefs. Another example comes from Peskin’s (1992) study that describes the influence of theory of mind understanding in children’s ability to understand deceit and to actively deceive others. It is not until children reach 4 years of age that they are able to consider the mental states of the other when they are asked to play a trick on a puppet. When children come to have this theory of mind insight, they are able to infer and predict the intentions and behavior of others, including story characters and authors. Theory of mind researchers have only recently begun to relate how children come to understand and talk about thought, to their lives in school (Astington, 1998) by considering, for example, how children make their understanding explicit by talking about what they think to be true. A question in that regard pertains to children’s understanding and use of metacognitive language. To what extent do they need this language to talk about thought? Metacognitive language is vocabulary that is used to describe mental states - terms such as “think”, “understand”, “believe”, “intend”, and “guess”. Astington & Jenkins (1999) examined the specific contribution of general language development to theory of mind understanding in first language learners; from this work we can say with some certainty that language development is necessary for theory of mind development. Furthermore, it may be that this metacognitive language, or “language of mind” (Astington & Pelletier, 1996), allows children to understand characters’ beliefs and intentions and, at higher levels, the author’s message to the reader. Higher-order understanding, such as developing theory of mind and metacognitive language skill, may play an important role in children’s developing understanding of story. Children’s ability to make inferences about the plot and to make evaluations about events and outcomes, may depend on the degree to which they are able to think and to talk about the characters’, the author’s and the reader’s perspectives. In this light, the present study aims to examine this role as children first begin to coordinate components of story meaning, specifically, plot and intention. “Coordination” is defined here as the ability to integrate these elements. According to Case’s neo-Piagetian theory of development (Case, 1985), stages of intellectual development are governed by distinct cognitive operations and structures. New structures are “assembled” and “integrated” into a qualitatively different coherent system (Case, 1992, p. 18). Case employs the term “coordination” to describe the joining of distinct understandings (p. 24). Applying Case’s theory to developments in children’s narrative understanding, McKeough (1992; 2000) examines the ways in which component parts of narrative become coordinated with development. Specifically, McKeough found that 4-year old children, regardless of length of story were only able to tell a story on the “plot” level (setting, initiating event, response, outcome). Six-year olds’ stories on the other hand, “showed evidence of a higher order construction assembled by coordinating” the events with the characters’ perceptions of the events (McKeough, 1992, p. 176). For example, in one of McKeough’s 6-year old’s stories, a crying child receives comfort when a friend offers to play with her. McKeough claims that events in story occurred, not as the result of a predetermined scripted solution to a problem, but rather, due to the character’s perceptions of what would resolve the problem. In this paper, we take this theoretical framework to discuss children’s coordination of the story landscapes of events (plot) and perceptions (consciousness). Bruner (1986) made the distinction between the two “landscapes” of narrative: the landscape of action and the landscape of consciousness. Action is the explicit plot, the outward behavior of the character/s, whereas consciousness is the implicit plot, that is, the inner world of the character/s. Although young children may grasp “action” plots, how much do they actually know about “consciousness”? Furthermore, why might that be important? McKeough and Sanderson (1996) claim that understanding consciousness leads to understanding consequences of action and reasons for it. When action and consciousness are coordinated into a meaningful event, children begin to understand not only what did happen, but what should happen; narrative provides a model to explain human behavior (McKeough, 1995). This model in turn allows them to connect past and future, to give order and meaning to their own and others’ lives (Bruner, 1990; 1994), a skill which becomes increasingly necessary as children enter the school system and are required to “make sense” of text. However, as Astington (1990) has suggested, children prior to the age of 4 years may not understand the dual landscapes of narrative. One explanation may be that children do not yet have a full understanding of mental states that allows them to make true sense of stories. Another explanation is that young children may not have a full grasp of narrative structure; here narrative structure includes both referential and evaluative content understanding, similar to Bruner’s notion of the dual landscapes of action and consciousness and McKeough’s notion of events and perceptions. In McKeough’s terms, the action moves from events themselves to the character’s response to and perception of events. The following example from a 6-year-old’s story illustrates this coordination: “A horse walks by a lamb in a barn (action) and it was lonely (consciousness) so the horse jumped in and the lamb jumped onto the horse.” (action) (McKeough, 1992) (italics added). There is support for the notion that “consciousness”, as separate from action, may not be well understood by young children and that an understanding of “consciousness” is still developing in late middle childhood (Flavell, Green, Flavell & Lin, 1999). Furthermore, it may be that children’s understanding of action precedes their ability to consider the thoughts behind the action (Bruner, 1996). It is important to understand ways in which factors such as age, language, and non-verbal intelligence enter into this relation. Although it has been suggested in the literature that theory of mind is the product rather than the basis of narrative understanding (e.g., Nelson, Plesa & Henseler, 1998), we adopt the view that theory of mind may facilitate or at least develop together with children’s experiential interpretations of story character consciousness as we interpret it here; perhaps the two may be explained by general language development alone. In addition to the theoretical frameworks outlined above, there is a wealth of research in the area of young children’s understanding of stories, employing various qualitative methodologies (e.g., Dyson, 1996, 1998; Graue et al, 1998). From this work we have learned important lessons about the role of specific environmental context, such as classroom setting, in interpreting children’s understanding of stories or other facets of childhood culture. The work presented here is complementary to this rich naturalistic body of literature. Although we limit our investigation to a quasi-experimental paradigm, we believe that it informs study of a more naturalistic variety. We anticipate that this approach to studying children’s understanding of stories leads us to ask more precise questions about children’s paths to higher-level story comprehension, such as that which happens in the naturalistic context of the classroom when children hear stories read by the teacher. Furthermore, it is important to point out that our interpretation of children’s theory of mind is limited to their performance on standard theory of mind (false belief) tasks, when indeed, more naturalistic measures of theory of mind are increasingly employed in this area of research (e.g., Cutting & Dunn, 1999; Szarkowicz, 2000). We explore the relations among theory of mind and the landscapes of action and consciousness by examining more closely how children use metacognitive terms or what has been called the “language of mind” (Astington & Pelletier, 1996) to bridge the two. Earlier we noted the considerable interest in recent years in Bruner’s notion of the dual landscapes. To this body of research we add a discussion of how children may develop the ability to retell the “dual landscapes” following an adult’s initial storytelling. We base our approach on the understanding that metacognitive language is critically interwoven in children’s ability to both understand and retell stories that involve mental activity. Of particular interest is the notion that children gradually come to understand the “embedded” nature of thought. That is, in order to retell the story with its true meaning and nuances, children must be able to use language that embeds action in the thoughts, beliefs and intentions of the story characters (“she is thinking that her father is wondering where she is”). Our aim was to use stories to elicit metacognitive language through picture books, and to compare children’s understanding of the action of the story with their understanding of the mental life of the characters, that is, their beliefs, desires and intentions. In order to do this, we needed stories that had simple, clear action plots as well as obvious references to consciousness. Many children are familiar with cartoon drawings depicting characters who either speak or think (Wellman, Hollander & Schult, 1996). The speech and/or thoughts are illustrated by way of speech or thought “bubbles”. With experience children learn that the words or pictures contained in the bubbles relate to the character in the story. In some cases there are words in the bubbles and in other cases there are pictures. Research indicates that even 3-year-olds are able to understand thought bubbles with pictures (Wellman et al., 1996). Since the children in our study were primarily pre-readers, we likewise chose to use thought bubbles containing pictures. The pictures within the thought bubbles were drawn so that children could easily understand the content of the thought. Based on the theory that children’s developing theory of mind ability allows them to consider the mental states of others, our first hypothesis was that children with more developed theory of mind as measured by false belief task performance, would be more able to integrate the consciousness of the story character with the real world action of the plot. Second, we wanted to confirm our hypothesis that children who understand and employ more metacognitive language would be more able to integrate the consciousness of the story characters with the real world action as this type of language may be necessary in order to integrate the two. Method Participants Child participants were 66 children selected at random from a larger group of children who were taking part in a longitudinal study examining young children’s theory of mind and its relation to their success in school. Of the subsample of 66, there were 31 four-year-old children who attended junior kindergarten programs (15 female, 16 male) and there were 35 five-year- olds who attended senior kindergarten programs (17 male, 18 female). Ages of the children ranged from 46 to 70 months (M=58.9 months, SD=6.9) Participants were drawn from four schools that spanned a range of socio-economic and cultural backgrounds. Three schools were located in a large public school board in a greater metropolitan area. Two of the public schools served families from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. The third public school served middle class families. The fourth school was a private school serving children from middle- to upper-socioeconomic backgrounds. The parental education at the four schools ranged from some high school to doctoral level degrees. Across the four schools, parents at two were SES public schools had primarily high school diplomas with some college experience. At the third, higher SES public school, parents had primarily college diplomas. At the private school, most parents had graduate degrees. Approximately 25% of the children (primarily from the two lower SES public schools) spoke English as a second language but were competent enough in English, as determined by their teachers and verified by the researchers, to participate in the testing. Teacher participants were 12 kindergarten teachers, including one male teacher. Ten of the teachers taught in half-day programs which combined the 4-year-old and 5-year-old kindergartens (junior and senior kindergarten). The remaining two teachers taught in kindergarten programs that were exclusive either to 4-year-olds (junior kindergarten) or to 5- year-olds (senior kindergarten). Procedures and Measures Tasks were administered individually to children in the fall and winter terms of the kindergarten year. Children were withdrawn individually from their classes by a female researcher and taken to a familiar room close to their classrooms. Task administration time varied across children, with an average time of approximately 15 - 20 minutes. Fall data collection occurred over two visits in order not to tire children and to optimize their task performance. Winter data collection required approximately 15 minutes for the storytelling. The two data collection periods were approximately 3 months apart. Fall Theory of mind tasks. There were four false belief tasks. Two tasks were stories involving the change in location of an object, similar to the original Wimmer and Perner (1983) task described earlier. In a third task we measured children’s understanding of another person's mistaken belief using a familiar box containing unexpected contents (Perner, Leekam & Wimmer, 1987). For example, a familiar candy box contains pencils. The child is first asked, “What’s in here?” When the child replies, “candies”, he/she is shown that there are really pencils in the box. The box is closed up again and the child is asked, 1) “What’s in the box?” 2) “What did you think was in the box before I showed you?” 3) “What will (friend’s name) think is in the box before I show him/her?” Children with less developed theory of mind understanding typically answer that they thought pencils were in the box and that their friend would think pencils were in the box. Children with more developed theory of mind understanding typically say that they thought candies were in the box and that their friend would say candies were in the box. The fourth task was an experimenter-made book which was designed to explore children’s understanding of another person's mistaken belief using an unexpected picture (Gopnik & Astington, 1988) in a similar way to the unexpected contents task. Children's responses to each of the four tasks were summed to give the total theory of mind score, which ranged from 0 to 4; the theory of mind question received a score of one or zero in each of the four items. control Control questions had to be answered correctly for credit to be given. We employed multiple theory of mind tasks in order to capture a wider range of performance. Test of Early Language Development (TELD). This task was administered according to standardized procedures. It measures four areas of early language development: receptive and expressive semantics and receptive and expressive syntax (Hresko, Reid & Hammill, 1981). Children's raw scores were used as a measure of their general language ability. WPPSI-R. We used the Block Design subtest of the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence - Revised (WPPSI-R) (Wechsler, 1989) as a measure of nonverbal intelligence. Children's raw scores were used in the analyses. The TELD and WPPSI-R Block Design scores were included as control variables. In order to explore the associations among theory of mind, understanding of characters’ thought, and metacognitive language, we included these control variables to control for the influence of general language and nonverbal ability. Winter Story retelling tasks. Two examiner-made wordless picture books were used to assess children’s ability to integrate the landscapes of action and consciousness in retelling a story. There were two story retelling paradigms. In one paradigm, an experimenter told a story script. In the second paradigm, we wanted to include a naturalistic context in which the teacher told a story in the way she/he normally would. In the first paradigm, Story 1, entitled Scott and the Squirrels, an experimenter showed the book and told the child the story, following a standard script (see Appendix A). Each page of the book represented one idea conveyed in one or two sentences. The gist of the story is as follows: There is a grey squirrel who hides a nut under a bush and runs off. While he is gone a brown squirrel finds the nut and hides it in a flower pot. Grey Squirrel comes back for his nut, and looks for it under the bush because he thinks that’s where it is. One day Scott witnesses this event and decides to play a trick on Brown Squirrel by moving the nut back to the bush so that Grey Squirrel will find it. Pictures depict Scott thinking about Grey Squirrel looking under the bush and about Brown Squirrel looking in the flower pot because they each think that is the location of the nut. Metacognitive terms were used frequently in the story script to convey the beliefs, desires, and intentions of the characters. After the experimenter finished telling the story, the child was asked to retell the story. Specifically, children were asked, “Now you tell me this story. You can turn the pages.” In the second paradigm, Story 2, entitled Rabbit, Wolf and Alligator, the teacher showed the book to the whole class and told the children a story based on the pictures. In this story, a lonely rabbit is tricked by a hungry wolf who dresses in a rabbit costume and feigns to be a rabbit friend. However the rabbit notices the wolf’s tail and realizes he has been tricked. The rabbit, in turn, pretends to take Wolf to see a friend (whom the Wolf presumes to be another rabbit), but the new friend turns out to be an Alligator, who scares Wolf away. Teachers were not told how to generate this story, but simply looked through the whole book before telling the story to the class and used their own words as they normally would (see Appendix B for example of one teacher’s storytelling). This task was included to provide a measure of the children's understanding of the story characters’ actions and thoughts in the naturalistic context of the classroom when the teacher reads or tells a story. There were differences across teachers in the total number of metacognitive terms used. In particular, teachers who used more words in general to tell the story, likewise used more metacognitive terms. Following the teachers’ storytelling, children were withdrawn individually and asked to retell the story. Specifically, children were asked, “Now you tell me this story that the teacher told your class. You can turn the pages.” Children’s story retelling of both stories was audiotaped and later transcribed and coded. Coding Each transcript was coded for frequency of reference to (1) Action-Only, (2) Consciousness Only, and (3) Coordinated Action-Consciousness, as follows: (1) Action-Only: verb phrases which referred to simple description of setting, events or actions, that is, the landscape of action; for example, “Here is a picture of Bunny Rabbit”, “That’s them going back to look”, “Rabbit is taking him to his friend Crocodile”, “And they’re running away”, “Brown Squirrel is taking the nut...and putting it in the flower pot”, “Grey Squirrel is looking in there again.” (2) Consciousness-Only: verb phrases which referred only to the picture within the thought-bubble without reference to the character who held the thought. From our perspective, this is the landscape of consciousness-only; for example, when shown a picture of Scott thinking about the squirrel looking under the bush, the Consciousness-Only score would be given for: “Squirrel looks under the bush.” (3) Coordinated Action-Consciousness: verb phrases which referred to characters' thought, mentioning both the character and the thought content, that is, integrating the landscapes of action and consciousness; for example, “The boy thought the Brown one could find it in the plant” (picture of Scott thinking of Grey Squirrel looking under the bush), “The boy got an idea...he put the nut out of the flower pot... and he put it under the bush” (picture of Scott thinking about moving the nut from the flower pot to the bush), “Then the wolf had an idea how he could get that bunny in the pot” (picture of Wolf thinking about Rabbit in a stew pot), “And the rabbit is thinking about a crocodile...I want Wolf to meet my friend Crocodile” (picture of Rabbit thinking about Alligator while holding out his hand to Wolf). Inter-rater reliability was calculated for each category of verb phrase as described in the preceding examples: Action-Only, kα = .91; Consciousness-Only, α k = .76; Coordinated Action-Consciousness, α k = .98. Analyses were carried out for the experimenter-modeled version alone and for the combination of experimenter and teacher-modeled stories (ie.exprimenter-only vs teacher + experimenter), in order to examine potential differences in children’s productions due to teachers’ individual versions of the second story. There were no significant differences between Story 1 and Story 2 in children’s proportionate scores (that is, controlling for total number of references to thought) for coordinating action and consciousness. No further separate analyses were carried out. All analyses were then carried out on the teacher + experimenter versions. Results The mean number of words children produced in retelling the two stories was 217 (range= 94-391), apart from one child who produced only 8 words in total (3 for story 1, and 5 for story 2). This child's data were excluded from further analysis. Scores for each of the categories Action-Only, Consciousness-Only, and Coordinated Action-Consciousness (A-C) were summed for the two stories. Analyses were carried out to compare means for boys and girls across all measures; there were no gender differences and gender was not considered further in the analyses. Mean scores for total number of words used in story retelling, and for the Action-Only, Consciousness-Only, and Coordinated Action-Consciousness (A-C) categories are shown in Table 1. The table also gives children's mean age and their mean scores for the Fall Term tasks: general Language Ability (TELD); Nonverbal Intelligence (Block Design subtest of WPPSI); and Theory of Mind (false belief task performance).

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In the story retelling, all children referred to Action, whereas only some children referred to Consciousness-Only or to Coordinated A-C. That is, all children could retell simple descriptions of setting, events and actions: the landscape of action. Some children were also aware of the action taking place in the story characters' thoughts but they retold this in a way that was unrelated to the character who held the thought. Other children were able to embed this action in the thought bubble in the character's real-world action, that is, to integrate the landscapes of action and consciousness, although most did not do this consistently across the whole story. Table 2 presents the means and standard deviations for 4 age groups for the variables of reference to “action only”, “consciousness only” and “integration of action and consciousness.”

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In light of the well-established finding that children “acquire” theory of mind understanding between four and five years of age, we were interested in examining the differences between these two age groups. WWhen hen only two age groups, that is, older children (5-year-olds) and younger children (4-year-olds) were compared in reference to Action- Only, Consciousness-Only and Coordinated A-C, significant differences were found across all three factors; specifically, older children referred more often to Action and to Action- Consciousness Coordination, whereas younger children referred more often to Consciousness- Only, that is they only paid attention to the picture inside the thought bubble. This difference can be seen in Figure 1. Five-year-olds were significantly more able to coordinate A-C and 4-year- olds were significantly more likely to refer only to consciousness.

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To test our assumption that metacognitive vocabulary use in the story retelling would be related to children’s ability to integrate the landscapes of action and consciousness, a total Metacognitive Vocabulary score was calculated by summing the frequency of metacognitive vocabulary use across the two stories. This score was run in a correlational analysis with children’s score on Coordinated A-C and was found to be highly and significantly correlated (r=.51, p<.001). Metacognitive vocabulary use was also significantly correlated with general Language Ability (r=.43, p<.001) and with Nonverbal Intelligence (r=.28, p<.05). In Story 2, teachers’ use of metacognitive terms was somewhat related to their students’ use of metacognitive terms, however, this relation only approached significance (p<.06). The modest trend points to an area for future research in theory of mind and metacognitive language training with a greater number of teacher participants. In order to more closely examine the development of the ability to coordinate landscape and consciousness relative to total reference to consciousness, we created a new variable: Coordinated-proportion = Coordinated A-C divided by (Coordinated A-C + Consciousness- Only). This variable indicates reference to Coordinated A-C as a proportion of total reference to thought (that is, Coordinated A-C and Consciousness-Only) independent of the actual number of such references. Children who referred separately to Action-Only and Consciousness-Only for each “thought bubble picture” received a score of zero for this variable, and children who referred to Action-Only and Coordinated A-C received a score of 1. The remainder received a proportional score that indicates their success at achieving coordination of the landscapes of action and consciousness. Children were divided into three groups on the basis of their Coordinated-proportion score: Low-Coordinated range = 0 - .25; Mid-Coordinated range = .33 - .71; High-Coordinated range = .75 - 1. Table 3 shows the mean age of each group and their mean scores for Language Ability, Nonverbal Intelligence, and Theory of Mind. There are significant differences among the groups for Age, Nonverbal Intelligence, and Theory of Mind, but not for general Language Ability (see Table 3).

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Table 4 3 shows the intercorrelations of Age (in months), Language Ability, Nonverbal Intelligence, Theory of Mind, and Coordinated-proportion. The ability to coordinate the landscapes of action and consciousness with appropriate metacognitive language was significantly related to age, nonverbal intelligence, and theory of mind, but not to general language ability.

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A stepwise hierarchical (could omit) regression analysis was performed in order to determine the independent contributions of these variables to children's ability to integrate the landscapes of action and consciousness. In this analysis Coordinated-proportion was the dependent variable and Age, Language Ability, Nonverbal Intelligence, and Theory of Mind were the independent variables. All variables were entered in the stepwise regression if they met the criteria for entry. The results show that only Age made an independent contribution to children’s Coordinated-proportion score (R² = .17, p<.001). Theory of Mind, although significantly related to Coordinated-proportion, just failed to make an independent contribution but did contribute at the .07 level. Language Ability, Nonverbal Intelligence, and Theory of Mind, because they covaried with age, but these were already partially accounted for in the equation, and thus did not enter it as making independent contributions (see Table 54). The remaining contribution of age might reflect differences in children's experiences, such as listening to stories.

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Discussion We set out to answer the questions: Would children attend to the landscape of consciousness in their retelling of the stories? Would an ability to coordinate the landscapes of action and consciousness be associated with general theory of mind performance? We also made the claim that metacognitive term use would be tied to story retelling that coordinated the dual landscapes of action and consciousness. Results showed that many children did coordinate the landscape of consciousness with the action of the plot in retelling the stories. That is, children who referred to the mental life of the story characters did so in mentioning what the character was doing and what he was thinking. The ability to coordinate the two landscapes was most strongly related to age. When a stepwise hierarchical regression analysis was carried out, theory of mind just failed to make an independent contribution to the understanding of embedded thought. The results suggest that children’s ability to understand and retell stories with coordinated action and consciousness landscapes follows a developmental path in much the same way as does theory of mind. Age may be a proxy for developmental variables such as theory of mind. It is also of interest to note that children with a more developed theory of mind are more likely to understand and use metacognitive language in retelling stories that involve bridging the landscapes of action and consciousness. In order to describe the embedded nature of thought, it may be necessary to use metacognitive terms such as “think”, “know”, “plan” and “dream”. This notion was supported by the results; children who were able to integrate the two landscapes did employ more metacognitive vocabulary than children who did not integrate. It is also compatible with the work of Tager-Flusberg (1997) and of Naigles, Hohenstein and Marsland (1997) who describe the use of metacognitive verbs that take sentence complements. Furthermore, Tager-Flusberg has found a similar connection between false belief understanding and understanding of mental state verbs (Tager-Flusberg, 1997). Our research suggests that children require the ability to use mental state terms in order to understand and retell the dual nature of action in children’s stories. The finding that general language ability was strongly related to theory of mind development is not surprising in light of previous work that has shown the primacy of language in theory of mind development (Astington & Jenkins, 1999 ; Jenkins & Astington, 1996). However, language ability played a lesser role in children’s ability to integrate the landscapes of action and consciousness; in fact the relation between the two just failed to reach significance. On the other hand, this ability to integrate the two landscapes was related to age, nonverbal intelligence and to theory of mind. In a regression analysis, only age made an independent contribution to variability. Experience factors related to age may account for differences among children. For example, some children may have more exposure to stories that involve the dual landscapes of action and consciousness and may have more adult facilitation in understanding both action and consciousness. Some children have more experience with story retelling than do others. In future work, it would be interesting to gather related data on the possible impact of family literacy practices, including children’s experiences with story retelling. The results of this study provide some preliminary evidence that children who have a more advanced theory of mind are more likely to understand both action and consciousness in the domain of narrative, but that this ability is also tied closely to other developmental factors. The ability to coordinate the landscapes of action and consciousness in narrative is an important development in children’s cognition, as it opens up a larger world of knowing, allowing children to participate in a more complex and interesting psychological world. In the case of narrative, children who have this understanding are more able to understand the perspective of the author, to participate in what Olson and Bruner call “objective knowledge” (Olson & Bruner, 1996). This psychological understanding goes beyond the surface understanding of plot development, which remains at a relatively low level of reading comprehension, but rather, brings children to an awareness of intentions, those of the characters and those of the author. It allows children to think more critically, to consider alternative views and to make judgments about important issues, such as morality. Moral stories may be useful in helping children think about others’ perspectives and how people make judgments (Narvaez, Gleason, Mitchell & Bentley, 1999). In educational terms, one might apply this relation to a taxonomy of reading comprehension (e.g., Bloom, 1956), where an understanding of action may be fostered in simple knowledge and comprehension processes and an understanding of consciousness may be fostered in higher level comprehension processes, such as synthesis and evaluation. This research takes a step further in investigating the specific processes related to children’s understanding of narrative and to their ability to retell a narrative sequence. It has been previously proposed that “mental states provide the ‘landscape of consciousness’, which complements the ‘landscape of action’” (Nelson, 1996, p. 188); the discrete processes and skills necessary to make that connection have been added in the present work. Children who have a more advanced theory of mind, as measured by traditional false belief tasks, tend to use more metacognitive language and tend to be more able to coordinate the landscapes of action and consciousness when retelling stories modeled by adults although this relation is closely tied to age. There are practical applications of these findings for schooling, including fostering higher-order comprehension by facilitating theory of mind understanding through a focus on metacognitive vocabulary development. Astington suggests that teachers can encourage children to make their early intuitive understandings explicit by talking about them (Astington, 1998). In district elementary school achievement tests in Ontario, Canada, Reading and Mathematics achievement test items include a high proportion of metacognitive terms, for example, “Explain your thinking”, “Estimate the number”, “What is your prediction?” “What did the character intend to do?” By training children in the meaning and use of the metacognitive terms we may be able to scaffold children more effectively to employ this understanding in school. Training may involve the use of wordless picture books with explicit reference to metacognitive terms, followed by the teaching of definitions and meanings in context, then the application of the terms in similar questions as they appear in the tests. Related work includes training studies in the language of mind and the dual landscapes of action and consciousness in children’s stories. For example, it has been found that teachers of kindergarten children rarely explicitly use metacognitive terms when telling children stories or when giving them instructions (Astington & Pelletier, 1996). With an intentional perspective toward teaching the integration of story action and story characters’ mental states (consciousness), teachers may be able to employ a metacognitive vocabulary task to teach children both the meanings of these terms and their use in everyday contexts such as narrative. It is hoped that our enhanced understanding of the importance of this ‘language of mind’ to children’s everyday experiences, such as listening to stories in kindergarten, will serve to help all children have a greater understanding of both real-world action and mental life.

References

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Table 1 Mean Scores, Standard Deviation, and Range for All Variables (N=65)

Mean SD Range

Age in months 58.95 6.90 46-70 Language ability 19.69 5.83 1-29 Nonverbal intelligence 17.80 7.94 4-35 Theory of mind 2.51 1.53 0-4 Total words 216.85 62.52 94-391 Action-Only 22.42 4.36 13-35 Consciousness-Only 3.18 1.73 0-7 Coordinated A-C 3.04 2.54 0-11 Table 2 Mean (SDs) scores for Action-only, Consciousness-only and Coordinate Action-Consciousness for four age groups

Action-Only Consciousness-Only Coordinated A-C

46-52 mths (n=12) 20.91 (3.03) 3.67 (1.61) 2.17 (2.41)

53-58 mths (n=17) 21.35 (5.04) 3.71 (1.16) 2.47 (1.97)

59-64 mths (n=20) 22.50 (3.43) 3.30 (1.89) 3.10 (2.75)

65-70 mths (n=16) 24.56 (4.94) 2.13 (1.78) 4.21 (2.66) Figure 1

Comparison of 4 & 5 year olds reference to

" consciousness-only" and "coordination A-C" 3.8

2.4 Consciousness-only

2.2 Coordination A -C 4 yr olds 5 yr olds Table 3 Mean Age and Mean Scores for the Three Coordinated Proportion Groups

Low Mid High Coord Coord Coord F (2,62) p (n = 20) (n = 29) (n = 16)

______

Age 55.2 59.3 62.9 6.58 <.01

Language Ability 18.3 19.5 21.8 1.72 ns

Nonverbal Intelligence 14.0 17.6 22.9 6.52 <.01

Theory of mind 2.1 2.2 3.5 5.08 <.01

Table 43 Pearson Correlations of Age, Language Ability, Nonverbal Intelligence, Theory of Mind, and Coordination (proportion) (N=65)

Age Language Nonverbal ToM

Language .36**

Nonverbal .51** .41**

Theory of Mind .27** .59*** .32***

Coordination .42** .15 .33** .31**

* p<.05 ** p<.01 ***p<.001

Table 54 Stepwise regression analysis summary for the variables of Age, Language, Nonverbal Intelligence, and Theory of Mind predicting Coordination Action-Consciousness

Variable ß Sig.

Age (predictor) .406 <.001

Language (excluded) .002 n.s.

Nonverbal Intelligence (excluded) .155 n.s.

Theory of Mind (excluded) .216 .07

Note. R²=.165 (N=65, F=12.45, p<.001) for the model with Age as predictor.

Appendix A

Scott and the Squirrels 1. Grey Squirrel and Brown Squirrel live in the trees in Scott’s backyard. 2. One day, Grey Squirrel hides a nut under a bush. 3. Then Grey Squirrel runs off to find more nuts. 4. Brown Squirrel takes Grey Squirrel’s nut and he hides it in the flower pot. 5. Later, Grey Squirrel comes back to get his nut. He looks for it under the bush. He thinks that’s where it is. 6. One day Scott sees Grey Squirrel hide his nut under the bush and run off. 7. Then Scott sees Brown Squirrel take Grey Squirrel’s nut and hide it in the flower pot. 8. Scott has an idea. He decides to take the nut from the flower pot... 9. And put it back under the bush. 10. Brown Squirrel and Grey Squirrel come back to the yard. 11. Scott knows that Grey Squirrel will look for his nut under the bush because he thinks that’s where it is. 12. Scott knows that Brown Squirrel will look for the nut in the flower pot because he thinks that’s where it is. 13. Scott is happy because Brown Squirrel got his nut back even though he didn’t know it was gone, and because Grey Squirrel thought he had the nut, but now he doesn’t know where it is! Appendix B

Example of one teacher’s storytelling script for Rabbit, Wolf and Alligator

The Rabbit, the Wolf , and the Alligator. - The bunny was sitting in the forest and he was very sad. He was sad cause he had no one to play with. - Here comes the big hungry wolf. And the wolf is thinking. Who is he thinking about? You’re right, the wolf is saying, “Hm, I would like to eat the rabbit.” - He was licking his lips and getting very hungry. He was thinking about eating rabbit stew for dinner. - The wolf knew that the rabbit would be afraid of him if he looked like a wolf. So he decided to dress up like something else. He was going to dress up like a bunny so that the bunny wouldn’t know that he was really a big bad wolf. - So he put on his bunny costume and he went to see the rabbit. And he said, “Hello Mr. Bunny Rabbit. I’m a bunny rabbit just like you. Would you like to come and play with me?” Do you think the bunny’s going to play with him? Do you think the bunny knows that it’s a wolf? - The bunny looks at the wolf and says, “I know he’s not a bunny! He’s really the big bad wolf.” - But the bunny has a plan. So he says, “Hello Mr. Bunny. I would love to play with you.” - And he takes him down the path and he finds an alligator. Who do you think the alligator would like to eat? - And there goes the alligator. The alligator is going to chase the wolf right away. And the bunny and the alligator are very good friends.