Children's early understanding of false belief

We investigated 3-year-olds' understanding of the representational capability of the mind by examining whether they would acknowledge that they had entertained a wrong belief. As in previous studies, children very often judged that they had believed a Smarties tube contained pencils when these were revealed as the true content, even though they had stated "Smarties" before the tube had been opened. Under another condition, when the tube was first presented, children mailed a picture into a postbox of what they thought was inside (Smarties). When asked "When you posted your picture, what did you think was in here (the tube)?" the great majority of children answered correctly with "Smarties". Additionally, children nearly always stated that the posted card displayed a picture of Smarties, and that the tube really contained pencils. On the traditional task, children may give the wrong answer because they are biased to make judgments about belief states on the basis of known physical reality. The posting task made it possible for children simultaneously to focus on physical reality and acknowledge false belief.     

Japanese children's development of false belief understanding

Two studies were conducted to examine the Japanese children's false belief understanding. Study 1, a small-scale meta-analysis that included 21 Japanese false belief studies yielding 60 data points, revealed that the Japanese children's false belief understanding develops with age (effect size = 2.48 in odds ratio for 1 year), the Japanese children's performance exceeds the chance level at the age of 64 months, and question type (think vs look-for) produced no statistically significant difference. An experiment (Study 2) employing a change-of-locations task was conducted to confirm these findings, manipulating question type as a within-participant factor. Participants were 43 Japanese kindergartners (24 boys and 19 girls; 3 yr. 4 mo. to 6 yr. 1 mo.). The results showed that Japanese children's false belief performance developed with age. Their performance level exceeded the chance level at the age of 5 years, and question type did not affect their performance.     

An association account of false belief understanding

The elicited-response false belief task has traditionally been considered as reliably indicating that children acquire an understanding of false belief around 4 years of age. However, recent investigations using spontaneous-response tasks suggest that false belief understanding emerges much earlier. This leads to a developmental paradox: if young infants already understand false belief, then why do they fail the elicited-response false belief task? We postulate two systems to account for the development of false belief understanding: an association module, which provides infants with the capacity to register congruent associations between agents and objects, and an operating system, which allows them to transform these associations into incongruent associations through a process of inhibition, selection and representation. The interaction between the association module and the operating system enables infants to register increasingly complex associations on the basis of another agent’s movements, visual perspective and propositional attitudes. This allows us account for the full range of findings on false belief understanding.     

A Meadian account of social understanding: Taking a non-mentalistic approach to infant and verbal false belief understanding

Performance on false belief tasks has long been considered a key indicator of the development of social understanding in young children. We consider the enabling conditions for performing non-verbal and verbal false belief tasks as well as a typical developmental path toward false belief understanding. We argue that, in early ontogenesis, children anticipate the coordination of activity with others rather than read, probe, or reflectively engage with the psychological states of others. As linguistically mediated reflective thought emerges, children gradually become able to parse and isolate the myriad of incipient somatic, affective, and intentional responses that arise in any given moment. With reflective thought, children also begin to develop distinct and temporally coherent understandings about the minds of self and other. We provide an account of how the reflective thought that facilitates false belief understanding emerges. Our account focuses on a gradually developing refinement of social coordination and the shared perspectival understandings inherent in social coordination.     

Young children's practical deceptions and their understanding of false belief

This paper deals with young children's understanding of false belief and their behaviour in situations of deception. It is argued that it is unsurprising that children under the age of 4 fail traditional false belief tests; and yet that children aged 2–3 do implement deceptive behaviours. To achieve compatibility, a particular category of deceptive acts (deceptive acts where awareness of the dupe's erroneous belief plays no role) is detailed. Deceptive behaviours are treated as belonging to the category of pretend behaviours. Some developmental considerations, concerning the links between deception and false belief are put forward.     

Children's understanding of promising, lying, and false belief

Understanding promising and lying requires an understanding of intention and the ability to interpret mental states. The author examined (a) the extent to which 4- to 6-year-olds focus on the sincerity of the speaker's intention when the 4-to 6-year-olds make judgments about promises and lies and (b) whether false-belief reasoning skills are related to understanding promising and lying. Participants watched videotaped stories and made promise and lie judgments from their own perspective and from the listener-character's perspective. Children also completed false-belief reasoning tasks. Older children made more correct promise judgments from both perspectives. All children made correct lie judgments from the listener's perspective. The author found that Ist-order false-belief reasoning was related to making judgments from the participant's perspective; 2nd-order false-belief reasoning was related to making judgments from the listener-character's perspective. Results suggest that children's understanding of promising and lying moves from a focus on outcome toward a focus on the belief that each utterance is designed to create.     

The influence of language and socioeconomic status on children's understanding of false belief

Study 1 investigated whether differences in the lexical explicitness with which languages express false belief influence children's performance on standard false belief tasks. Preschoolers speaking languages with explicit terms (Turkish and Puerto Rican Spanish) were compared with preschoolers speaking languages without explicit terms (Brazilian Portuguese and English) on questions assessing false belief understanding either specifically (the think question) or more generally (the look for question). Lexical explicitness influenced responses to the think question only. Study 2 replicated Study 1 with groups of both speakers differing in socioeconomic status (SES). A local effect of explicitness was found again as well as a more general influence of SES. The findings are discussed with regard to possible relations among language, SES, and understanding of mind.     

Relationship between implicit false belief understanding and role play: Longitudinal study

Pretend play is one of the earliest forms of children’s imagination. While social pretend play (role play) may facilitate the development of theory of mind – including false belief understanding – theoretically, the reverse may be true; theory of mind may facilitate the development of role play. To clarify this relationship, the present longitudinal study examined whether toddler’s implicit understanding of false beliefs predicted their role play during preschool years. We examined 18-month-old toddlers’ looking time in an implicit false-belief task (Time 1). When the children were 4/5 years old (Time 2), children’s parents answered a questionnaire on their child’s engagement in role play, such as playing with an imaginary companion and impersonating an imagined character. Toddlers’ looking time in the false-belief task at Time 1 predicted impersonation scores at Time 2. The results suggest that early theory of mind skills can facilitate children’s role play.     

Eighteen-month-old infants show false belief understanding in an active helping paradigm

Recently, several studies have claimed that soon after their first birthday infants understand others’ false beliefs. However, some have questioned these findings based on criticisms of the looking-time paradigms used. Here we report a new paradigm to test false belief understanding in infants using a more active behavioral response: helping. Specifically, the task was for infants to help an adult achieve his goal - but to determine that goal infants had to take into account what the adult believed (i.e., whether or not he falsely believed there was a toy inside a box). Results showed that by 18 months of age infants successfully took into account the adult’s belief in the process of attempting to determine his goal. Results for 16-month-olds were in the same direction but less clear. These results represent by far the youngest age of false belief understanding in a task with an active behavioral measure.     

Relations between mental verb and false belief understanding in Cantonese-speaking children

Previous research has shown that linguistic forms that codify mental contents bear a specific relation with children’s false belief understanding. These forms include mental verbs and their following complements, yet the two have not been considered separately. The current study examined the roles of mental verb semantics and the complement syntax in children’s false belief understanding. Independent tasks were used to measure verb meaning, complements, and false belief understanding such that the verbs in question were present only in the verb meaning test, and no linguistic devices biased toward false belief were used in the false belief test. We focused on (a) some mental verbs that obligatorily affirm or negate what follows and (b) sentential complements, the content of which is to be evaluated against the mind of another person, not reality. Results showed that only (a) predicted false belief understanding in a group of Cantonese-speaking 4-year-olds, controlling for nonverbal intelligence and general language ability. In particular, children’s understanding of the strong nonfactive semantics of the Cantonese verbs /ji5-wai4/ (“falsely think”) predicted false belief understanding most strongly. The current findings suggest that false belief understanding is specifically related to the comprehension of mental verbs that entail false thought in their semantics.     

Children's understanding of false beliefs that result from developmental misconceptions

Most studies of false belief have focused on beliefs about specific and arbitrary facts. The purpose of this research was to extend the study of false belief to false beliefs that result from the general misconceptions that characterize young children's understanding of the world. Three experiments, employing diverse methods, examined preschool children's ability to attribute false beliefs with respect to a variety of cognitive-developmental acquisitions: Level 2 perspective taking, appearance/reality, line of sight, and biological principles of growth and innate potential. Children showed some but incomplete mastery with respect to each of these new forms of false belief, and the level of performance was in most instances comparable to that found with standard measures. Despite this equivalence in overall difficulty, new and standard forms of false belief were not correlated in any of the three experiments.     

Associations among false belief understanding,counterfactual reasoning,and executive function

The primary purposes of the present study were to clarify previous work on the association between counterfactual thinking and false belief performance to determine (1) whether these two variables are related and (2) if so, whether executive function skills mediate the relationship. A total of 92 3‐, 4‐, and 5‐year‐olds completed false belief, counterfactual, working memory, representational flexibility, and language measures. Counterfactual reasoning accounted for limited unique variance in false belief. Both working memory and representational flexibility partially mediated the relationship between counterfactual and false belief. Children, like adults, also generated various types of counterfactual statements to differing degrees. Results demonstrated the importance of language and executive function for both counterfactual and false belief. Implications are discussed.     

Oscillatory brain activity differentially reflects false belief understanding and complementation syntax processing

False belief understanding (FBU) enables people to consider conflicting beliefs about the same situation. While language has been demonstrated to be a correlate of FBU, there is still controversy about the extent to which a specific aspect of language, complementation syntax, is a necessary condition for FBU. The present study tested an important notion from the debate proposing that complementation syntax task is redundant to FBU measures. Specifically, we examined electrophysiological correlates of false belief, false complementation, and their respective true conditions in adults using electroencephalography (EEG), focusing on indices of oscillatory brain activity and large-scale connectivity. The results showed strong modulation of parieto-occipital alpha (8–12 Hz) and beta (13–20 Hz) power by the experimental manipulations, with heightened sustained alpha power reflective of effortful internal processing observed in the false compared to the true conditions and reliable beta power reductions sensitive to mentalizing and/or syntactic demands in the belief versus the complementation conditions. In addition, higher coupling between parieto-occipital regions and widespread frontal sites in the beta band was found for the false-belief condition selectively. The result of divergence in beta oscillatory activity and in connectivity between false belief and false complementation does not support the redundancy hypothesis.     

A longitudinal, microgenetic study of the emergence of false belief understanding and inhibition skills

Two theories that attempt to explain the relationship between false belief understanding and inhibition skills were investigated: (1) theory of mind development improves self-control, and (2) executive control is necessary for developing a theory of mind. A microgenetic approach was adopted, with a group of 21 children completing a battery of inhibition and false belief understanding tasks every four weeks for six phases of testing. The results showed that the majority of children were able to perform well on a test of executive inhibition before having a good understanding of false beliefs, thus supporting theory (2). The results also illustrated that while the children's inhibition skills developed relatively gradually, their understanding of false beliefs progressed from a consistent lack of understanding through a period of unstable performance, during which some children failed tests that they had previously passed.     

Knowing that I didn't know: preschoolers' understanding of their own false belief is a predictor of assents to fictitious events

The present study examines the relation between children's theory of mind abilities and their tendency to assent to fictitious events when questioned repeatedly across interviews. Children between the ages of 3 and 6 years were interviewed individually either four or seven times about a fictitious and a real staged event, and in addition given a false belief test as well as a fantasy‐reality distinction test. Children's performance on the false belief task addressing the understanding of their own false belief was a better predictor for assents to false events than was understanding the false belief of another person, age, number of interviews and performance on a fantasy‐reality distinction task. Children's memory for a staged event showed that repeated questions across interviews was related to a decrease in correct assents to having experienced a staged event, an increase in wrong yes‐responses about touch and erroneously mentioning names of children who had not been present during the staged event. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Implicit understanding of belief

Implicit understanding of false belief was investigated by monitoring where children look in anticipation of a protagonist reappearing, when the protagonist mistakenly thinks that his desired object is in a different place from the place where it really is. This implicit measure of understanding was contrasted with children's explicit answers to the experimenter's question about where the protagonist would look for the object. Children from 2 years 5 months to 2 years 10 months erroneously looked at the object's real location, which they gave for their answer. From 2 years 11 months to 4 years 5 months, about 90% of the children looked at the empty location where the protagonist thought the object was.In sharp contrast, only about 45% of the children in this age span gave that location as their explicit answer to the experimenter's question. These results are explained in terms of a distinction between representing a fact and making a judgment about that fact.     

The other side of false belief: Constructing the objectivity of reality

Young children appear not to grasp the independence between objective reality and subjective beliefs, as evidenced by their errors on false belief tasks. Whereas decades of research have examined children's developing understanding of the subjectivity of beliefs, however, almost no research has examined the other side of the issue: How do humans come to understand the objectivity of reality, and why is this understanding important? To help address this gap, this article proposes an evolutionary-developmental account of how the understanding that reality is objective may have emerged in human thinking. Three key steps are highlighted: (i) phylogenetic foundations in great ape competitive mindreading, (ii) ontogenetic foundations in preverbal infant joint attention, and (iii) key experiences of perspectival conflict in linguistic humans. Functionally, the concept of an objective reality facilitated collaborative reasoning and joint decision-making. To arrive at good joint decisions, individuals needed to recognize that both their own beliefs and others' beliefs could be wrong—with respect to the objective reality.     

The relationship between second‐order false belief and display rules reasoning: the integration of cognitive and affective social understanding

To investigate the relation between cognitive and affective social understanding, Japanese 4‐ to 8‐year‐olds received tasks of first‐ and second‐order false beliefs and prosocial and self‐presentational display rules. From 6 to 8 years, children comprehended display rules, as well as second‐order false belief, using social pressures justifications decreasingly and motivational justifications with embedded perspectives increasingly with age. Although not related to either type of display across ages, second‐order tasks were associated with both types of display tasks only at 8 years when examined in each age group. Results suggest that children base their second‐order theory of mind and display rules understanding on distinct reasoning until middle childhood, during which time the originally distinct aspects of social understanding are integrated.     

Children's understanding of belief as a normative concept

The variety of accounts of theory of mind development, arising from distinct theoretical perspectives, have focused on children's causal-explanatory views on the mind and have not developed accounts of children's normative judgments of the mental domain. This review maintains that such a focus is unfortunate and leaves our understanding of belief as a concept incomplete. First, by presenting an alternative framework that treats belief as a normative concept, this account discusses the central importance of children's understanding of epistemic justification and their appreciation of the normative significance of others’ reasons for belief. Next, this review of the relevant theory of mind literature proposes a new way of thinking about the findings of various domains in this field and gives particular attention to prior work on false belief, origins or sources of belief, and the distinctions between fantastical and epistemic states. On the basis of this review, it is concluded that in order to accurately assess the development of the concept of belief, further research is required on children's views of how beliefs ought to be formed, their evaluation of justified and unjustified believers, and the notions of duty or responsibility they associate with epistemic agents.