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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: [e-mail]

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

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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

[e-mail]

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

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