Stage fright: Internal reflection as a domain general enabling constraint on the emergence of explicit thought

Abstract

It has become increasingly clear over the last half century that there are multiple important changes in children’s abilities taking place at around age 4. These changes span social, emotional, and cognitive domains. While some researchers have argued that a domain-general development explains some of the changes, such a position is a minority view. In the current article, we provide some evidence for the development of an age 4 domain-general enabling constraint on children’s ability to reflect. In turn, the development of reflection is argued to enable the transitions that we see within and across developmental domains. The model of reflection being offered is part of a broader action-based model of cognition and mind – interactivism (Bickhard, 1973, 1978, 2009a,b). The empirical part of the article presents a new object reasoning task. This task was derived from theoretical constraints on the interactivist models of knowing and reflection. Results indicated that most children responded to the task incorrectly until age 4 which was interpreted as evidence that they lacked the ability to explicitly reason about relations between objects. Correlations between our new task and standard false-belief tasks were explored. Collectively, these results provide empirical support for the claim that children undergo a domain-general development in their ability for epistemic reflection at around age 4.