The acquisition of a theory of action and the dissociation between action intention and outcome intention in children aged 2-6 years

Abstract

The aim of an action is linked to a desire, the choice of the action is linked to the subject’s beliefs about the world. Much data on the acquisition of a theory-of-mind by children evidence a lag in the conceptualisation of desires and beliefs. The authors assume that there is also a lag between the awareness and the recall of an outcome intention and of an action intention. Their central idea is the following: When an action fails, the outcome intention is frustrated and the associated action intention is deleted by a new action intention more in agreement with the expected outcome. This hypothesis was confirmed in a ” rst experiment when action intention and outcome intention verbalisations were clearly differentiated. A second experiment showed that the difficulties were not associated with an inadequate analysis of temporal markers. The hypothesis of a conceptual lag between binary and ternary structures, via the activation of more sophisticated computing in the latter case (according to Fodor, 1992), was theoretically attractive, but it was not possible to support it empirically in a third experiment. A fourth experiment compared an action intention item with a false belief item. A ”fth and a sixth experiment, both using a nonverbal design, confirmed the previous data. The six experiments were conducted with 310 children aged from 2;6 to 6;6 years.