CATEGORIZATION AND THEORIES OF MIND - THE CASE OF THE APPEARANCE REALITY DISTINCTION/

According to a large body of research in the field dealing with Theori es of Mind, it appears as though children before the age of four have not acquired a conception of the mind which enables them to understand that one and the same invididual might have different mental represen tations of a given object. This inability causes them to fail on appea rance/reality tasks. This result was replicated here on a sample of 64 French children (Study 1). Yet studies on early categorization using forced-choice picture tasks, which can be considered as an 'optimal co ntext', have shown that children under age four are already capable of placing the same object in different categories: perceptual-activatio n/taxonomic-inhibition, and vice versa. Given the isomorphism between these categorization tasks and appearance/reality tasks (appearance-ac tivation/reality-inhibition, and vice versa), we devised a metacogniti ve training device which used a guided solving procedure and forced-ch oice picture tasks in order to promote the earlier emergence of the di stinction between appearance and reality (Study 2). The results indica ted no training effect, and an interaction between the categorization activity and the types of errors made in the appearance/reality task. The children who made mostly perceptual first choices on the categoriz ation task made mostly phenomenist errors on the appearance/reality ta sk. Those who made mostly taxonomic first choices on the categorizatio n task made mostly realist errors on the appearance/reality task. We s uggest that the greatest difficulty in appearance/reality tasks may li e in the need for metacognitive control to manage the activation and i nhibition processes in 'doubly misleading' problems.