Habilidades mentalistas en niños argentinos de 4 a 6 años: Adaptación de una escala de desarrollo de Teoría de la Mente / Mentalizing Skills In Argentine Children Between The Ages Of Four And Six: Adaptation Of A Development Scale Of Theory Of Mind

RESUMEN

Resumen Este trabajo presenta los resultados del estudio sobre habilidades mentalistas en niños preescolares argentinos. Su interés reside en la importancia que revisten los logros conceptuales en el desarrollo de la Teoría de la Mente y el método adecuado para medirlos, dada la escasez de estudios sobre el tema en el ámbito local. Con un diseño descriptivo transeccional se examinaron 105 niños (4 a 6 años de edad) con la Escala de Teoría de la Mente de Wellman y Liu (2004), compuesta por 7 tareas diferenciadas, adaptada al español rioplatense. Entre los resultados de este estudio se destaca que, al igual que los hallazgos reportados por los autores de la escala, los porcentajes de respuestas correctas aumentan con la edad cronológica y disminuyen de acuerdo a la complejidad de la tarea. La secuencia y la dificultad creciente de las tareas son consistentes, aunque tal como lo proponen Wellman y Liu es necesario limitar las siete tareas originalmente propuestas a cinco, para ajustarse a los requerimientos de un escalograma. Los porcentajes de respuestas correctas hallados son menores a los encontrados en la investigación original teniendo en cuenta, además, que no se incluyeron niños de 3 años. La escala resulta un instrumento adecuado en la medida que proporciona evidencia empírica de la complejidad de las habilidades involucradas, así como de su progresión, imposibles de ser aprehendidas a través de una tarea única, tal como sucede en las evaluaciones que incluyen solo tareas de falsa creencia.

ABSTRACT

Abstract This work introduces the results obtained in the study of mentalizing skills in pre-school Argentine children. Interest in this lies on the importance of conceptual achievements marking the normal development of the Theory of Mind (TM) and the appropriate way to measure them, and on the lack of studies on the subject in the region. The TM is understood as the capacity to infer emotions, beliefs and desires, and to use such inferences to predict and explain one's behavior as well as that of others. This theory has been studied thoroughly for the past 40 years due to its implications for communicative competence and social interaction, given that if a child fails to understand the relations between behavior and mental states, he or she will have difficulties understanding social situations in everyday life. Its assessment has changed based on how this theory has been conceptualized in connection with its birth and development. The initial conception, which considered it as a single capacity acquired once and for all, was replaced by a more gradualist approach. This enabled the enlargement of the notion of TM to a series of increasingly elaborate and flexible conceptual acquisitions formed throughout a child's psychological development. Based on the hypothesis that a series of mentalist achievements following a predictable sequence occur during a child's normal development, Wellman and Liu (2004) designed a scale which operationalizes the TM. The instrument, which was to be used with pre-school children, consisted of 7 tasks which examine various skills 1. Diverse desires, 2. Diverse beliefs, 3. Knowledge access, 4. Contents false belief, 5. Explicit false belief, 6. Belief-emotion and 7. Real-aparent emotion. The aim of this paper is to present the results obtained with Wellman and Liu's TM Scale in pre-school children living in the city of La Plata, Province of Buenos Aires (Argentina), and to compare them against the results obtained by the authors. With a cross-sectional descriptive design, 105 children aged between 4 and 6 were tested using the TM Scale adapted to Rioplatense (River Plate) Spanish. Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence (WPPSI III) was also used in order to check intellectual level and exclude the protocols of the children who scored below 70 in the Total IQ. Among the results of this study, as well as the findings reported by the authors of the scale, it is noteworthy that the percentage of right answers increases with chronological age and decreases in relation to task complexity. The sequence and the increasing difficulty of the tasks are consistent, however, as proposed by Wellman & Liu, it is necessary to limit the original 7 tasks to 5, to conform with the requirements of a scalogram within the ages taken into consideration. The percentages of correct answers found in this study are lower than those found in the original investigation, taking into account, in addition, that 3 years old children were not included. The scale constitutes an adequate instrument in that it provides empirical proof of the complexity of the skills involved as well as of their progression, both of which are impossible to apprehend through a single task, as is the case of the assessments including only false belief tasks. All in all, the differences found in the performance of the participants included with respect to the original study require further research in not only cross-sectional but also longitudinal studies of clinical and non-clinical populations.