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Consciousness and control: The argument from developmental psychology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 October 1999

Philip David Zelazo
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada M5S 3G3 zelazo@psych.utoronto.ca psych.utoronto.ca/~zelazo/
Douglas Frye
Affiliation:
Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104 doug@psych.nyu.edu

Abstract

Limitations of Dienes & Perner's (D&P's) theory are traced to the assumption that the higher-order thought (HOT) theory of consciousness is true. D&P claim that 18-month-old children are capable of explicitly representing factuality, from which it follows (on D&P's theory) that they are capable of explicitly representing content, attitude, and self. D&P then attempt to explain 3-year-olds' failures on tests of voluntary control such as the dimensional change card sort by suggesting that at this age children cannot represent content and attitude explicitly. We provide a better levels-of-consciousness account for age-related abulic dissociations between knowledge and action.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Copyright
© 1999 Cambridge University Press

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