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Running Head: THEORY OF MIND AND DIVERGENT THINKING

Theory of Mind and the Origin of Divergent Thinking
Thomas Suddendorf and Claire M. Fletcher-Flinn
Department of Psychology
University of Auckland
Auckland, New Zealand
ph: 649-3737599
e-mail: t.suddendorf@auckland.ac.nz
Abstract
The development of a `theory of mind' may not only be
important for understanding the minds of others but also for
using one's own mind. To investigate this supposition, forty
children between the ages of three and four were given false-
belief and creativity tasks. The numbers of appropriate and of
original responses in the creativity test were found to
correlate positively with performance on false-belief tasks.
This association was robust, as it continued to be strong and
significant even when age and verbal intelligence were
partialled out. The results support the hypothesis that the
metarepresentational skills involved in theory of mind also
affect the way children can access and scan their own mental
repertoire beyond the areas of currently activated content
(i.e. divergent thinking). With the advent of theory of mind a
basic cognitive shift takes place in human development, and
possibly took place in cognitive evolution.
Theory of Mind and the Origin of Divergent Thinking
Introduction
Theory of mind (ToM), or the appreciation of the
representational nature of mind and its relation to behavior,
has become the subject of much research in developmental and
comparative psychology (e.g. Cheney & Seyfarth, 1990; Gopnik,
1993; Perner, 1991; Premack & Woodruff, 1978). Although
evidence has accumulated that great apes (e.g. Byrne & Whiten,
1992; Premack & Woodruff, 1978) and very young children (e.g.
Gopnik & Slaughter, 1991; Wellman, 1991) have some
understanding of their own and others' desires and intentions,
neither have been shown to understand informational states,
such as those of knowledge and belief (e.g. Premack & Dasser,
1991; Wimmer & Perner, 1983). This latter ability appears to
be reserved for humans older than about three years, and only
then can a representational ToM be acertained.
Tasks involving the attribution of false beliefs have
become the standard tool for assessing the acquisition of ToM.
The attribution of a false belief implies an understanding of
the fact that mental states are attitudes to representations
of the world rather than attitudes to the "real world" itself.
Since the representational contents of true beliefs correspond
by definition to actual states of the "real world", only
predictions of somebody's behavior when it is based on a false
belief unequivocally show an appreciation of the
representational nature of mental states. ToM is evident, for
example, when the child understands that people may search for
a desired object at the place where they think it is rather
than at the place where the child knows it is. The individual
thus has to acknowledge that a representation can be false
while the metarepresentation remains true (e.g., it is true
that the other person holds a belief that is false) (e.g.
Baron-Cohen, Leslie & Frith, 1985; Dennett, 1987; Flavell,
1993; Gopnik, 1993; Gopnik & Astington, 1988; Wimmer & Perner,
1983). False-belief tasks may also involve an executive
component because the individual is required to disengage from
the current representational content in order to assume
somebody else's (or one's own former) different beliefs (e.g.
Russel & Jarrold, in review; Suddendorf & Corballis, in
press).
When this level of understanding has been achieved (i.e.
ToM has been acquired), the child can impute mental states
even when these contradict his or her own current mental
states, and the diversity of the heterogenous mental world
becomes accessible. This mental feat has obvious significance
for the development and evolution of social intelligence and
most research has focused on these social effects (e.g.
Astington & Jenkins, 1995; Baron-Cohen, 1995; Baron-Cohen,
Leslie & Frith, 1985; Byrne & Whiten, 1992; Dunn, Brown,
Slomkowski, Tesla & Youngblade, 1991; Wimmer & Perner, 1983).
At the same time, however, it has been claimed that ToM
is important also for self-understanding, self-monitoring and
self-regulation (e.g. Humphrey, 1986; Perner, 1991; Povinelli,
in press; Suddendorf, 1994). Only when the representational
nature of mind is understood may one truly reflect and
introspect, that is, form beliefs about beliefs (e.g., I must
be right with my view that...), attitudes about knowledge
(e.g., I don't want to know), second-order motives (e.g., I
don't want my desire to play to interfere with my work), and
so forth. It might thus be expected that skills that
apparently depend upon mental access to one's own mind (e.g.
knowing that and what one knows) improve dramatically with the
acquisition of ToM (i.e. when false-belief tasks are passed).
Divergent thinking might be such a skill. Several
researchers have identified metarepresentation as an important
factor in creativity. Determining whether possible solutions
fulfill the criteria of the problem, for example, might be a
function of metacognition (e.g. Ebert, 1994; Feldhusen, 1995).
Divergent thinking by its very definition appears to require
the individual to search his/her own knowledge base beyond the
currently activated domain of mental content. This may entail
the same basic process of executive control or disengagement
from current perceptions and knowledge as is required for
assuming a belief that is evidently false. On a higher plane
(at a later age) disengaging from a current paradigm and
"investing" in disregarded areas is, of course, the key to
creative new insights (e.g., Sternberg and Lubart, 1991).
Further, active scanning of one's knowledge base in search of
appropriate answers appears to imply the ability to
metarepresent (i.e., to know what one knows). Knowing what
others know (as in ToM tasks) and knowing what oneself knows
might be very closely related skills. Indeed, some might
suggest that the former is an extension of the latter (cf.,
Harris, 1991). Thus, if it is true that divergent thinking and
attribution of false beliefs draw on the same mental
developments, one should expect to find strong correlations
between tasks that measure these skills. In other words,
children who pass false-belief tasks would be expected to do
much better on divergent thinking tasks than children who do
not, because they should be able to scan knowledge from
diverse, otherwise unrelated, domains in the process of
generating new, divergent answers that fit the problem
criteria (cf. Wallach, 1970).
Karmiloff-Smith (1990) described the development of
flexible access to originally domain-specific knowledge in a
study of children's creative drawings. She, too, argued that
changes in children's imaginative power come about because
they develop explicit representations of knowledge they
already possess implicitly. In other words, her finding
supports the idea that the ability to metarepresent (and to
disengage from current representations) is critical for
generating divergent solutions.
The present study was designed to address whether or not
children who have a ToM are in fact better at searching their
own minds for creative answers. We administered false-belief
and creativity tasks to three- and four-year-old children.
Further, we included a verbal intelligence test to control for
the potentially confounding influence of mental age on
correlations between ToM and creativity.
Method
Subjects
Forty children, 23 girls and 17 boys, all of whom took
part in a broader study on the relation between computers,
gender, and social thinking, were tested. The majority of the
children were of middle SES and the mean age was 50 months
(range= 36 to 58 months). The children were recruited from
three playcentres (on Waiheke Island, New Zealand), with the
consent of parents, staff and the children themselves.
Individual testing took place in a quiet room in each of these
centres.
Tasks
Creativity Task. The creativity task consisted of two
subtasks of Wallach and Kogan's (1965) creativity test. We
followed Ward's (1968) adaptation of the task for
preschoolers. In the instances subtask, the children were
asked to declare all the things that they could think of that
were round, or had wheels, or were red. In the uses subtask,
they were asked to declare all the ways in which they might
use, or play with, a newspaper, a cup, a table knife, and a
coat hanger. In a permissive testing situation each suggestion
was followed by liberal praise and the child was encouraged to
think of more answers by phrases such as: "What else?, Can you
think of something else?...". Both tests were presented as
games and the time spent on each question continued until the
child said that s/he had no further ideas. To standardize the
procedure the experimenter offered encouragement at least
three times before suggesting that they move to the next item.
However, when the child was uncomfortable the questioning was
stopped and either the next item was introduced or testing was
completed on another occasion.
Performance was scored on two different measures:
fluency and uniqueness. First, however, all unique responses,
that is, ideas that were put forward only by one child, were
given to two independent raters and those that both deemed
inappropriate (e.g. Q: what is red? A: An orange) were
eliminated and not scored. Identical replies from two or more
children were automatically considered appropriate. The
remaining responses were then scored for each individual a) by
adding up the absolute number of ideas (fluency-score), b) by
adding up the total number of unique ideas (uniqueness-score).
For further details of the procedure see Ward (1968).
False-Belief Task. The false-belief task was administered
in three trials, the first two following Prior, Dahlstrom and
Squires' (1990) description (from a paradigm originally
developed by Baron-Cohen, Leslie & Frith, 1985) and the third
implementing a suggestion by Russel and Jarrold (in review).
Two dolls, Sally and Anne, were introduced to the child and,
when the names were learnt, the following story was told and
enacted: "Sally has a marble and she puts it into her basket
and closes the lid. She says good-bye and goes out to play.
Now `naughty Anne' takes the marble out of the basket and
places it into the box and closes both lids." The child is
then asked a memory and a reality question: "Where did Sally
put the marble?" and "Where is the marble now?". (In the
exceptional case of a child failing on the memory or reality
question, the child was reminded of the true situation and the
procedure was repeated from the start.) Then the false-belief
question is asked: "When Sally comes back where will she look
first for her marble?" The second trial is identical to the
first except that the hiding place is the tester's pocket
rather than the box.
After these two trials the procedure (using the box as
the place were Anne hid the marble) was followed once more but
the belief question was altered (following Russel & Jarrold's
suggestion) to: "Will Sally look at the right or at the wrong
place? [right and wrong were counterbalanced]", followed by:
"Show me the right place, and show me the wrong place [asking
for the indicated, either right or wrong place, first]".
Children received zero points for no correct answer to
the first two belief questions, one point for one correct
answer and two points for answering both questions correctly.
The third trial, the variation suggested by Russel and
Jarrold, was scored separately with a zero for an incorrect
and a one for a correct reply. A reply was only considered
correct when the answer "at the wrong place" was followed by
prompted correct pointing to the (empty) basket.
Verbal Intelligence Test. The British Picture Vocabulary
Scale (BPVS; Dunn, Dunn, Whetton & Pintillie, 1982) was
introduced to the children as a picture book game and standard
format was followed. The raw scores were converted into IQ and
mental age.
Results
The mean IQ of the sample was 97 (sd: 12), ranging from
74 to 120 (Note that British norms were applied to New
Zealanders, which possibly acounts for the slight deviation at
the lower end of scores). When converted into mental age the
mean translated into 48 months (sd: 13) and ranged from 25 to
75 months.
False-Belief Tasks
Twenty-seven children answered both false-belief
questions correctly and 10 failed on both, while 3 gave one
correct and one incorrect answer. The Russel and Jarrold
version revealed a similar distribution with 26 passing and 14
children failing the test. However there was a discrepancy
between the two measurements. Four children who passed both
questions of the classic version failed when asked whether
Sally would look at the right or the wrong place. And three
children who failed at least on one of the first two trials
answered this third question correctly.
Of the three children (7.5%) who performed ambivalently
(i.e. one correct and one incorrect answer) on the two classic
trials, one passed the Russel and Jarrold version and was
therefore classified as having a ToM (receiving 2 points in
total), while the other two failed this task and were
classified as not yet having a ToM ( <2 points). The single
ToM measure resulted therefore in 28 children with and 12
children without a ToM.
Creativity Tasks
Ten unique responses (items mentioned only by one child
in the study) were judged inappropriate by two independent
raters and thus were excluded from further analysis. This
constituted 4.8% of all unique items. The remaining items were
then scored as fluency (total number of responses) and
uniqueness (number of unique responses) values for the
instances and uses conditions. The top of Table 1 presents the
means and standard deviations of these measures.
_____________________________
Insert Table 1 about here
_____________________________
Relationship Between False-Belief and Creativity Tasks
A t-test to examine the effect of having or not having a
ToM on the performance on the creativity tasks was performed.
A significant effect was found on both, the total fluency
scores [t(38) = 4.85, p < .001] and the uniqueness scores
[t(38) = 3.44, p < .005]. Biserial correlations between ToM
and total fluency and uniqueness scores were .62 and .48
respectively, accounting for 38 and 23% of the variance of
performance (see Table 1).
Mental age (chronological age and IQ combined) correlated
significantly with the creativity measures (fluency: r = .47,
p < .01; uniqueness: r = .40, p < .05), although Wallach and
Kogan (1965) specifically designed the test to measure
creativity independently of general intelligence.
Thus, the association between ToM and creativity might
have been caused by the mediating variables of age and
intelligence. In order to determine whether this was the case,
we calculated partial correlations controlling for these
variables. Neither partialling out chronological age (fluency:
r = .58, p < .001; uniqueness: r = .45, p < .005) nor BPVS
scores (fluency: r = .52, p < .001; uniqueness: r = .40, p <
.01) reduced the association between ToM and creativity below
significance. In fact, the correlations remained significant
and relatively strong (fluency: r = .51, p < .005; uniqueness:
r = .40, p < .01) even when age and scores on the BPVS were
partialled out. Thus, results show a robust association
between ToM and creativity.
Discussion
This is the first demonstration of a relationship between the
attribution of false beliefs and the amount and uniqueness of
creative responses in preschoolers. The fluency scores can be
regarded as a quantitative measure of the success of mind
search. The uniqueness scores, while not independent from
fluency scores, provide an estimate for divergence of the
search. That no other child produced the item suggests that it
is semantically removed from close association in most peers
(perhaps even within the child's own semantic net). Producing
many unique items therefore suggests either that the
individual has a very distinct semantic network from those of
the other children or, perhaps more plausibly, that the child
retrieved the items from a wider search (i.e. divergent
thinking).
Because the creativity tasks did not involve any obvious
kind of mental attribution, this finding points to another
factor underlying both measures. The prime candidates, since
the relationship holds even when intelligence and age are
partialled out, is improved metarepresentational capacity and
the ability to disengage from the immediate present.
Understanding false beliefs in others requires the individual
to dissociate from the immediate situation and to form a
representation of the other's representation. Similarly, one
may argue that the creativity task requires the children to
dissociate from the immediate situation and to represent one's
own knowledge, scanning it for items with a particular
feature. This theoretical argument is consistent with the
informal observation that during the testing procedure younger
children tended to look for answers in their immediate
environment (e.g. eyes=round, shirt=red), while older children
gazed at the ceiling, apparently looking "inside" for
appropriate responses. The data support the hypothesis that a
general, rather than a specifically social, representational
improvement takes place between age 3 and 4.
However, we cannot rule out that other factors that we
did not measure, and thus did not partial out, might have been
responsible for the association we observed. Controlling for
differences in age and verbal intelligence may cover the most
likely interfering variables, but others are possible. Future
research has to address these possibilities and preferably
tackle the developmental changes in a longitudinal study.
Despite the preliminary nature of the finding, if supported by
other research, the association between ToM and creative
thought might have far-reaching consequences on the way we
view not only the ontogeny but also the phylogeny of the human
mind.
Creative thought, like language, requires informational
access to varied domains of knowledge in the generative
process of combining and recombining items into virtually
infinite numbers of novel sequences. Metaknowledge may be
essential for this process to properly unfold. Corballis
(1991) claimed that generativity is unique to the human
species. Considering the fact that to date there is no
convincing evidence for metaknowledge in animals (Cheney &
Seyfarth, 1990; Heyes, 1993; Premack & Dasser, 1991), the
present data support this claim.
Cheney and Seyfarth (1990) examined the evidence for ToM
in nonhuman primates and noted that monkeys possess what they
called a laser beam intelligence. That is, monkeys act
apparently intelligently in one domain, while being unable to
transfer that knowledge for application in another. Humans are
very skilled at such transfer. With metarepresentation the
domain specifity may have been overcome. Evolutionarily, the
development of ToM would then have been an important factor
not only in the social domain and in understanding the self,
but also in the utilisation of mental capacities through
metarepresentation, as in the case of divergent thinking. In
this way social intelligence, which according to the
Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis (Byrne & Whiten, 1992;
Humphrey, 1976; Jolly, 1967) gave rise to human intellectual
evolution, might have paved the way for new ways of using the
mind. Flexible transfer of knowledge between different domains
is one of the hallmarks of humans' relentless creativity and
invention.
Summary
Passing false-belief tasks has been found to correlate
positively with the amount and originality of answers produced
on the creativity task. The association was found to be robust
as it remained strong and significant even when age and verbal
intelligence were partialled out. This result was taken as
preliminary support for the hypothesis that both performances
are dependent upon metarepresentational skills and an ability
to disengage from current mental content. The emerging theory
of mind may therefore not only be important for social
understanding but also for understanding and utilizing one's
own mind. This suggests that by the age of four children have
developed the cognitive foundation which allows them to
actively engage in divergent thinking.
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Author Note
Thomas Suddendorf, Department of Psychology; Claire M.
Fletcher-Flinn, Department of Psychology.
The performance of this sample on the false-belief tasks
has been reported elsewhere in the context of a study on
preschoolers computer use (Fletcher-Flinn and Suddendorf, in
press). This research was supported by a Telecom, New Zealand
research grant to the second author. We thank the teachers,
parents and children of the Waiheke Kindergarten, Chris'
Creche, and Waiheke Playcenter for their participation,
hospitality and support. We also thank M.C. Corballis for
valuable comments on an earlier version of this paper.
Correspondence concerning this article should be
addressed to Thomas Suddendorf, Department of Psychology,
University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019, Auckland, New
Zealand. Electronic mail may be send to
t.suddendorf@auckland.ac.nz
Table 1
Response Means, Standard Deviations, and Correlations for
Creativity Measures
---------------------------------------------------------------
Measures
--------------------------------------------------------
Instances Uses Total
--------------------------------------------------------
Uniqueness Fluency Uniqueness Fluency Uniqueness Fluency
---------------------------------------------------------------
Mean 2.53 7.80 2.45 7.08
5.00 14.88
SD 2.08 4.56 2.10 2.81
3.71 6.65
---------------------------------------------------------------
Correlations:
ToM .49** .57** .35* .55** .48** .62**
Mental
age .31 .40* .37* .48** .40* .47*
*
---------------------------------------------------------------
* p < .05
** p < .01



ToM and divergent thinking