̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Theory of Mind

Gardeners and carpenters: the ‘skill’ of parenting

Anonymous — Thu, 08 Nov 2018 09:20:41 +0000

Professors Claire Hughes and Paul Ramchandani have spent their adult lives studying children. Both are fascinated by the complicated jigsaw of early child development. “Such a lot happens in pregnancy and the first few years of life: the child’s brain and physical development, the acquisition of new skills and knowledge, it’s utterly transforming,” says Ramchandani, Cambridge’s first LEGO Professor of Play.

But while we know much about what goes on, we understand far less about how the outside world shapes this transformation – knowledge we need as parents, practitioners and policymakers to provide environments that help children thrive.

It’s clear, for instance, that our mothers, fathers and families affect our lives and the people we become, but has understanding the importance of parent–child relationships led to modern-day parenting approaches that stifle rather than help a child to flourish?

“Think carpenters and gardeners,” says Hughes, referring to a book by American psychologist Alison Gopnik published in 2016. “Gopnik’s theory is that parents who behave like carpenters mould their child by a deliberate, organised and focused influence on their development; those who behave like gardeners create a safe, nurtured and free environment that helps their child to shape themself.”

Hughes’ work looks at how parents talk to children in their early years and what this means for how children develop some of the most crucial skills of their lives. Since she began her academic career as an undergraduate in Cambridge 30 years ago, her focus has shifted from clinical groups, including children with autism, to studying social influences on two key psychological constructs – theory of mind and executive function.

Psychologists use the term theory of mind, or mind reading, to describe awareness that other people have thoughts, feelings, intentions and desires. Most children develop theory of mind around the age of four. “Without it you can’t joke, you can’t lie, you can’t get sarcasm – the many social things that hinge on what others say and mean to say,” she says.

As a result, theory of mind is pivotal to children’s ability to interact and form social relationships, but it doesn’t act alone. Along with theory of mind comes executive function – all those higher-order thinking skills such as planning, adapting plans when situations change and working memory.

“These two things go hand in glove,” explains Hughes, whose research is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. “You need good executive function to acquire a theory of mind, because how we process information from others depends on being able to keep track of information and shift attention, and we know that poor executive function often leads to behavioural problems, which can in turn affect children’s ability to learn from social situations.”

By following a group of 117 children from toddlerhood to adolescence, and developing a new battery of tests – including an innovative ‘silent film’ task based on Harold Lloyd’s 1923 comedy Safety Last!, developed with one of her former students, Dr Rory Devine – Hughes has been able to gain a deeper understanding of how family environments shape young children’s theory of mind.

Her studies show that how parents talk to toddlers – in particular the extent to which they use words such as ‘think’, ‘believe’, ‘understand’ and other so-called ‘mental state talk’ – predicts how well children do at the silent film task when they reach the age of ten.

One of her new studies, which involves more than 400 first-time families in the UK, USA and Netherlands, aims to tease out differences in the way that fathers and mothers talk to their children. “We’re filming children at home at four, 12 and 24 months and we are now following them up at nursery at the age of three,” says Hughes. “It’s a big study, producing very rich data, and we’re using some interesting technology – including a device that’s like a talk pedometer – to get at children’s linguistic environments.”

Such detailed, long-term studies could, she hopes, lead to simple and effective tools to help parents foster their children’s theory of mind skills. Together with Professors Lynne Murray and Peter Cooper at the ̽��ֱ�� of Reading, Hughes is testing a South African intervention based on reading picture books, something that’s on the decline within UK families.

“It’s been a revelation to me to see how hard some parents find it to read a picture book. Some literally just read what’s on the page, and if there are no words they just show the picture,” she says. “ ̽��ֱ��South African study shows that in ten weeks you can take parents who aren’t very good at this type of reading and show them how to get their child involved.”

Testing new interventions is also central to Ramchandani’s research, not least because as well as an academic he’s also a practising psychiatrist. “I come from a medical background where you want to learn stuff so that you can do something about it,” he says.

He’s currently leading a randomised controlled trial with parents from London, Peterborough, Oxford and Hertfordshire to see if video feedback is a viable way of promoting positive child development. Over six sessions, parents are filmed playing with their toddler and the videos are then used to help parents notice – and respond appropriately to – their child’s communication.

One of his long-standing areas of interest is the role fathers play in the lives of their young children, something he feels has often been overlooked. “There are obvious reasons for this – mothers are more often the primary carers and theories that have dominated psychology have revolved around the mother–child relationship – plus, over the past 30 years, most research on children’s relationships with parents has focused on mothers,” says Ramchandani.

Before arriving in Cambridge in early 2018, he conducted the first major study of depression in fathers, which revealed that paternal – as well as maternal – depression has an impact on child outcomes.

“This study got me thinking about the family constellation, about how mothers and fathers influence children, and how children influence parents too, which led to my interest in play as one aspect of those relationships.”

Since then, he’s studied the way fathers play with their babies and found that when fathers were more physically and emotionally engaged, children did better behaviourally and cognitively. “It’s striking to see how different fathers can have very different styles of interacting with their babies, even though they are very young, with some getting stuck in and leading the play, and others watching and following their child’s lead more”.

Ramchandani is Director of Cambridge’s Centre for Research on Play in Education, Development and Learning, and with the team will be looking at an even wider field of play – studying its role in learning and social development, and finding the best way of measuring playfulness itself.

“Healthy child development is a fascinating and complicated picture: a jigsaw comprising fathers, mothers, siblings and the wider world, and involving language, play, physical and psychological health and more,” adds Ramchandani. “By getting a clearer picture of how it works, we have the best chance of helping to improve children’s lives around the world.”

Inset image: read more about our research on the topic of children in the ̽��ֱ��'s research magazine; download a pdf; view on Issuu.

Wanting your child to have the best chance in life is natural for any parent. But by focusing too much on the ‘skill’ of parenting, are we losing sight of things that matter more – how we talk to and play with children? Cambridge researchers are examining how parents can best help their children in their early years through nurturing rather than shaping.

Healthy child development is a fascinating and complicated picture. By getting a clearer picture of how it works, we have the best chance of helping to improve children’s lives around the world

Paul Ramchandani

Sushobhan Badhai

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Peter Pan and Wendy: how J M Barrie understood and demonstrated key aspects of cognition

amb206 — Wed, 03 Aug 2016 09:16:39 +0000

In Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, J M Barrie describes a moment when a young girl, seeking to comfort a tearful Peter, gives him her handkerchief. But he doesn’t know what to do with it. Barrie writes: “… so she showed him, that is to say she wiped her eyes, and then gave it back to him, saying ‘Now you do it,’ but instead of wiping his own eyes he wiped hers, and she thought it would be best to pretend that this is what she had meant”.

With this touching little scene, J M Barrie neatly demonstrates that he had observed, and understood, something that psychologists call intentionality – a feature of ‘theory of mind’. ̽��ֱ��ability to understand that one’s own knowledge, beliefs and feelings might not be the same as someone else’s is one of the keys to understanding the complexity of human relationships – and is something that most children learn at the age of three or four.

In illustrating this fundamental stage of child development through the interaction of two children, one with a solid grasp of other minds and the other without, Barrie was remarkably prescient. ̽��ֱ��Peter Pan books were written at the turn of the 20th century and the term ‘theory of mind’ was not used until the late 1970s. In 1985 psychologists showed that failure to employ theory of mind is an important symptom of autism, its related condition Asperger’s Syndrome and various other psychiatric conditions.

In Peter Pan and the Mind of J M Barrie: An Exploration of Cognition and Consciousness, neuroscientist Dr Rosalind Ridley unpacks the magic and oddity of the tales that have captivated audiences for generations. In doing so through the lens of her own expertise, she reveals that Barrie had an almost uncanny grasp of human cognitive development four to eight decades before psychologists began to work on similar questions about the way we develop thinking and reasoning skills.

Ridley has a distinguished career in neuroscience research with the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and Medical Research Council. Her work has focused on the brain mechanisms underlying cognitive processes such as learning, memory and problem solving. Since childhood Ridley has been an avid reader of literature and poetry – and a collector of books.

Rereading Barrie’s books for children she began to realise the extent to which Barrie had grasped many of the topics that she has spent her working life researching in order to come up with new treatments for dementia and to gain a better understanding of neurological conditions such as stroke which cause cognitive impairments.

Peter Pan and the Mind of J M Barrie is the first book of its kind to explore fully how Barrie delved into the complexity of the developing human mind in his writing. Published at a time when cognitive psychology was in its infancy, the Peter Pan books were immediate hits and continue to inspire pantomimes complete with pirates, princesses and perambulators.

Ridley argues that Barrie’s enduring appeal (along with that of other authors for children, including Lewis Carroll) lies in his study of the unconscious mind – and its many quirks and foibles. Barrie referred to his nonsensical ideas (a boy who flies, a dog who becomes a children’s nanny, a crocodile who has swallowed a clock) as whimsicalities. These whimsicalities, proposes Ridley, are the means by which Barrie explores the nature of cognition – and that his purpose was to expiate the pain of his own childhood.

She writes: “It is Barrie’s deliberate use of cognitive mistakes and confusions in order to both amuse and illuminate the way we think that suggests that he was being intentionally analytical rather than descriptive. ̽��ֱ��weirdness of some of Barrie’s illogical stories suggests that he is tapping into something important in cognition.”

In a wealth of detail, and through close textual analysis, Ridley shows how Barrie created a narrative that works on several levels: as a coming-of-age story, as the myth of a golden age, as a fantasy to delight child and adult readers. Most importantly, asserts Ridley, Barrie invented Peter Pan to “make some sense of his own emotional difficulties, to investigate the interplay between the world of facts and the world of imagination, and to re-discover the heightened experiences of infancy”.

In Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens Barrie describes for readers how the story comes from an inner dialogue with the fictional boy David during walks together in the park. “First I tell it to him, and then he tells it to me, the understanding being that it is quite a different story; and then I retell it with his additions, and so we go on until no one could say whether it is more his story or mine.”

Peter Pan is the boy who doesn’t quite fit in, a ‘betwixt-and-between’ who can fly and, most famously, never ages and never becomes adult. There is, suggests Ridley, a bit of Peter in all of us: “the child who lives in the heart of the adult; memories that we carry with us throughout our life but do not themselves age; dreams that disobey logic; the private world inside our head and those moments of exceptional experience that we rarely talk about”.

Barrie was fascinated by children – they were his preferred companions throughout his adulthood – and he, just like Peter Pan, was in many ways a boy “who could never grow up”. Ridley suggests that the Peter Pan books can be read as an escape from adulthood into a fantastical childhood, where anything can happen, but also as a plea for greater understanding of the mental and emotional needs of children.

A broad university education equipped Barrie to think across disciplines, and in fashionable London he was exposed to the ideas of leading thinkers, including Thomas Huxley, H G Wells and Henry James. ̽��ֱ��belief that God made the world in seven days had been newly overturned by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution which showed that humans were animals.

Barrie saw children not as miniature adults waiting for their minds to be filled with facts, or small savages needing to be disciplined (as Baden-Powell who founded the Boy Scouts had done), but as developing beings who required nurture and encouragement in order to become sensitive adults. Ridley notes, interestingly, that Barrie believed education was often damaging.

Ostensibly, Barrie wrote the Peter Pan books to entertain five boys whom he met in Kensington Gardens in central London. ̽��ֱ��nature of his relationship with them (their parents died and he became their guardian) is likely to remain a vexed question. Despite the almost purple prose in which Barrie described the overnight visit of an imaginary child, Ridley is impressed by the view of the youngest of the boys themselves, who said that Barrie was “an innocent, which is why he could write Peter Pan”.

Ridley, like most other scholars, sees Barrie’s tragic childhood as pivotal to his creativity. His older brother died in a skating accident and remained more alive in their mother’s thoughts than her surviving son. Ridley writes: “He learnt from his mother’s pre-occupation with his dead brother that things that do not exist physically can be more important in people’s minds than things that do exist.” Barrie’s mother was present but lost to him – and a search for a mother is a strong theme in his books.

Barrie married but was childless (it’s thought that he may never have had sex with his wife). He was painfully aware of his diminutive stature, writing in a letter: “Six foot three inches … if I had really grown to this it would have made a great difference in my life”. He struggled with sleep problems and described many of the states of consciousness and unconsciousness later identified by psychologists as parasomnias.

An important role of sleep is to consolidate and rationalise memory. Barrie expresses this charmingly in Peter and Wendy: “It is the nightly custom of every good mother after her children are asleep to rummage in their minds and put things straight for next morning, repacking in their proper places the many articles that have wandered during the day… It is quite like tidying drawers … When you wake in the morning, the naughtiness and evil passions with which you went to bed have been folded up small and placed at the bottom of your mind; and on top, beautifully aired, are spread out your prettier thoughts, ready for you to put on.”

Ridley describes Barrie as “a naturalist of the mind”. Woven into his stories are dozens of details about human behaviour – from contagious yawning (Wendy’s “light blinked and gave such a yawn that the other two yawned also”) to mental constructs such as time travel (an aspect of memory and recollection) and the power of opposites (“It was her silence that they heard”). They reveal Barrie to be an acute observer of animals and people in a period when the theory of evolution was still hotly contested.

Barrie may have been extraordinarily forward-thinking but he was also a man of his time. Although he champions girls in some respects (“Wendy, one girl is of more use than twenty boys”), his attitude was frequently misogynistic: in creating his female characters he conflates femininity with domesticity. ̽��ֱ��original Wendy house, that potent symbol of gendered play, is built around Wendy by the fairies who seek to protect her from the cold of the night.

Ridley concludes that Barrie was more than anything interested in “the nature of consciousness and those rare moments of sublime consciousness and sublime imagination that we all experience” – the happiness that so often eluded him. She ends her voyage into JM Barrie’s mind with a quote from his protégé, A A Milne, creator of Winne the Pooh. In his autobiography, It’s Too Late Now, Milne wrote: “Childhood is not the happiest time of one’s life; but only to a child is pure happiness possible.”

Peter Pan and the Mind of J M Barrie: An Exploration of Cognition and Consciousness by Rosalind Ridley is published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

In a fascinating study of J M Barrie’s classic works for children, Dr Rosalind Ridley (Newnham College) reveals that the creator of Peter Pan, and a panoply of other characters, had a deep understanding of the science of cognition – and was decades ahead of his time in identifying key stages of child development.

... the child who lives in the heart of the adult; memories that we carry with us throughout our life but do not themselves age; dreams that disobey logic; the private world inside our head and those moments of exceptional experience that we rarely talk about.

Rosalind Ridley (writing about Peter Pan)

Rosalind Ridley

'Away he flew, right over the houses to the Gardens': illustration by Arthur Rackham for 'Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens'

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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̽��ֱ��Impact of Idealism

bjb42 — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 09:15:50 +0000

̽��ֱ��culmination of an international project which aims to trace the legacy of German Idealism - an explosion of philosophical ideas which emerged from Germany during the 19th century - begins in Cambridge today (Thursday, 6 September).

Over the past three years, more than 40 researchers from Britain, Germany and the United States have been involved in the “Impact of Idealism” project, examining how the idealist movement, perhaps the most influential force in philosophy over the past two centuries, shaped the way in which we see the world and ourselves today.

Even though we may not realise it, the concepts which emerged as a result of the idealist movement have influenced subjects as varied as politics, biology, literature and psychology. In spite of this, how those ideas seeped into so many different areas of life has never really been studied - until now.

Researchers involved in the “Impact of Idealism” project have been studying the way in which the outpouring of new ideas changed fields far beyond the realm of philosophy itself, as well as the way in which the same concepts were then developed and passed down through generations. Their conclusions will be presented in the form of a series of papers at the three-day conference, which is taking place at Magdalene College, Cambridge. Among those speaking will be the Archbishop of Canterbury and new Master of Magdalene, Rowan Williams, and the writer and philosopher, Roger Scruton. A four-volume book compiling all of the contributors’ work will be published by Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press next year.

“ ̽��ֱ��questions and issues that dominate German idealism did not just concern the idealists themselves, they had a lasting impact on the way we think now.” Professor Nick Boyle, principal investigator on the project, said. “Two centuries later, we are still preoccupied by many of the same problems.”

German Idealism began in the late 18th-century, against the turbulent backdrop of the French Revolution. Its first major figure was Immanuel Kant, whose idea of “transcendental idealism” revolved around the notion that the mind was key to the way in which we perceive the world, and that the world was filtered by perception.

Kant argued that we can only understand or make judgements about the world around us (or anything else) by experiencing it through our senses, then applying a framework of concepts to those experiences. This was a new theory of the mind, and pointed out the limits of human cognition by claiming that what we see is a world of appearances processed by our minds, and that it is impossible to understand it independently of ourselves.

̽��ֱ��philosophical movement which sprang from this has been the focus of the “Impact of Idealism” project. Thinkers like Fichte, Schelling and (most famously) Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel developed and challenged Kant’s ideas, providing new and sometimes contentious sets of theories on the nature of the human mind and what shapes our self-consciousness and perception of the world, and our engagement with it.

Importantly, however, these ideas did not get lost in a vacuum. Later nineteenth-century figures we naturally recognise as shaping the way we think now, such as Darwin, Marx and Freud, were themselves profoundly influenced by the world view created by the Idealist generation of German philosophers. In the 20^th century concepts and issues first formulated by Kant and the post-Kantians preoccupied and inspired both Anglo-American thinkers and French existentialists, post-structuralists, and post-modernists.

̽��ֱ��researchers behind the “Impact of Idealism” project argue that this process continues to affect some of the biggest questions of the 21st century. Theories of the mind and human society derived from Idealism define and shape fields as varied as neuroscience - in which researchers are explicitly trying to understand the relationship between mind and brain - inter-faith relations, or postmodern literature and art.

“If we want to understand why we are concerned about these problems and why we are approaching them in the way we are, we need to understand that they are closely related to a set of philosophical ideas that began 200 years ago,” Boyle said. “In its most influential form, German idealism was the backdrop against which many of our current ideas about politics, society and culture emerged. It is not the case that these people had certain ideas and we have had the same ones in the 21st century. They contributed directly to the way in which we think about the world now.”

German Idealism changed the world and influenced politics, science, art and numerous other fields. ̽��ֱ��ways in which it shaped the modern world have been the subject of a three-year research project, which reaches its conclusion in Cambridge this week.

Two centuries later, we are still preoccupied by many of the same problems.

Nick Boyle

Wikimedia Commons.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, one of the leading figures in the German Idealist movement.

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