The Essential Child. Susan Gelman. New York: Oxford University Press. 2003. 392 pages, $49.95 (US), cloth or paper.

To evaluate the claim that correct performance on unexpected transfer false-belief tasks specifically involves mental-state understanding, two experiments were carried out with children with autism, intellectual disabilities, and typical development. In both experiments, children were given a standard unexpected transfer false-belief task and a mental-state-free, mechanical analogue task in which participants had to predict the destination of a train based on true or false signal information. In both experiments, performance on the mechanical task was found to correlate with that on the false-belief task for all groups of children. Logistic regression showed that performance on the mechanical analogue significantly predicted performance on the false-belief task even after accounting for the effects of verbal mental age. The findings are discussed in relation to possible common mechanisms underlying correct performance on the two tasks.     

Executive and theory-of-mind contributions to event-based prospective memory in children: exploring the self-projection hypothesis

In two studies, 4- to 6-year-olds were asked to name pictures of animals for the benefit of a watching hand puppet (the ongoing task) but to refrain from naming and to remove from view any pictures of dogs (the prospective memory [PM] task). Children also completed assessments of verbal ability, cognitive inhibition, working memory, and false-belief understanding (both studies), empathy (Study 1 only), and performance on false-sign tests that matched the false-belief tests in narrative content and structure (Study 2 only). Both studies found that inhibition and false-belief performance made unique contributions to the variance in PM, although in Study 1 the influence of inhibition was evident only when children needed to withhold naming. Study 2 further demonstrated that false-belief performance was the only reliable predictor of whether children remembered to return to the researcher an object that had been loaned to them prior to the picture-naming game. Both experiments uncovered moderate relations between PM and chronological age, but such relations were rarely significant after taking account of cognitive ability. We consider the implications of the findings for (a) current views regarding frontal/executive contributions to PM development and (b) the suggestion that the same brain network underlies various forms of mental self-projection, including envisioning the future and understanding the minds of other people.     

When representations conflict with reality: the preschooler's problem with false beliefs and "false" photographs

It has been argued that young preschoolers cannot correctly attribute a false belief to a deceived actor (Wimmer & Perner, 1983). Some researchers claim that the problem lies in the child's inadequate epistemology (Chandler & Boyes, 1982; Wellman, 1988); as such, it is specific to the child's theory of mind and no such problem should appear in reasoning about nonmental representations. This prediction is tested below in the "false photograph" task: here an actor takes a photograph of an object in location X; the object is then moved to location Y. Preschool subjects are asked: "In the picture, where is the object?" Results indicate that photographs are no easier to reason about than are beliefs. Manipulations to boost performance on the photograph task proved ineffective. Further, an explanation of the failure as a processing limitation having nothing to do with the representational nature of beliefs or photographs was ruled out. It is argued that young children's failure on the false belief task is not due to an inadequate epistemology (though they may have one) and is symptomatic of a larger problem with representations.     

学前儿童欺骗及欺骗策略发展的研究

选取130名学前儿童,采用“找钱币”欺骗任务和标准误信念任务,研究学前儿童欺骗及欺骗策略的发生、发展。结果发现:随年龄增长,采用“破坏证据”和“说谎”欺骗策略的人数呈下降趋势,采用四种联合策略的人数则呈上升趋势;即使3岁儿童也能出示“破坏证据”和“说谎”这两种行为主义的欺骗策略,但“制造虚假痕迹”的心理主义欺骗策略在4岁以后才开始出现;3岁、6岁儿童的误信念理解与欺骗策略不相关,而4岁和5岁儿童的则相关。     

The curse of knowledge in reasoning about false beliefs

Assessing what other people know and believe is critical for accurately understanding human action. Young children find it difficult to reason about false beliefs (i.e., beliefs that conflict with reality). The source of this difficulty is a matter of considerable debate. Here we show that if sensitive-enough measures are used, adults show deficits in a false-belief task similar to one used with young children. In particular, we show a curse-of-knowledge bias in false-belief reasoning. That is, adults' own knowledge of an event's outcome can compromise their ability to reason about another person's beliefs about that event. We also found that adults' perception of the plausibility of an event mediates the extent of this bias. These findings shed light on the factors involved in false-belief reasoning and are discussed in light of their implications for both adults' and children's social cognition.     

Children are cursed: an asymmetric bias in mental-state attribution

Abstract - Young children have problems reasoning about false beliefs. We suggest that this is at least partially the result of the same curse of knowledge that has been observed in adults—a tendency to be biased by one's own knowledge when assessing the knowledge of a more naive person. We tested 3- to 5-year-old children in a knowledge-attribution task and found that young children exhibited a curse-of-knowledge bias to a greater extent than older children, a finding that is consistent with their greater difficulty with false-belief tasks. We also found that children's misattributions were asymmetric. They were limited to cases in which the children were more knowledgeable than the other person; misattributions did not occur when the children were more ignorant than the other person. This suggests that their difficulty is better characterized by the curse of knowledge than by more general egocentrism or rationality accounts.     

Visual perspective taking impairment in children with autistic spectrum disorder

Evidence from typical development and neuroimaging studies suggests that level 2 visual perspective taking - the knowledge that different people may see the same thing differently at the same time - is a mentalising task. Thus, we would expect children with autism, who fail typical mentalising tasks like false belief, to perform poorly on level 2 visual perspective taking as well. However, prior data on this issue are inconclusive. We re-examined this question, testing a group of 23 young autistic children, aged around 8 years with a verbal mental age of around 4 years and three groups of typical children (n = 60) ranging in age from 4 to 8 years on a level 2 visual perspective task and a closely matched mental rotation task. The results demonstrate that autistic children have difficulty with visual perspective taking compared to a task requiring mental rotation, relative to typical children. Furthermore, performance on the level 2 visual perspective taking task correlated with theory of mind performance. These findings resolve discrepancies in previous studies of visual perspective taking in autism, and demonstrate that level 2 visual perspective taking is a mentalising task.     

Testing the domain-specificity of a theory of mind deficit in brain-injured patients: evidence for consistent performance on non-verbal, "reality-unknown" false belief and false photograph tasks

To test the domain-specificity of "theory of mind" abilities we compared the performance of a case-series of 11 brain-lesioned patients on a recently developed test of false belief reasoning () and on a matched false photograph task, which did not require belief reasoning and which addressed problems with existing false photograph methods. A strikingly similar pattern of performance was shown across the false belief and false photograph tests. Patients who were selectively impaired on false belief tasks were also impaired on false photograph tasks; patients spared on false belief tasks also showed preserved performance with false photographs. In some cases the impairment on false belief and false photograph tasks coincided with good performance on control tasks matched for executive demands. We discuss whether the patients have a domain-specific deficit in reasoning about representations common to both false belief and false photograph tasks.     

3～5岁幼儿错误信念理解能力的发展趋势

基于以往支持心理理论执行功能表达论的研究结果,对标准错误信念任务修正后采用阶段性错误信念任务,运用实验法对101名3~5岁儿童进行研究。结果发现:(1)新任务保留了标准错误信念任务的优势,能勾勒出幼儿错误信念理解能力的发展趋势;(2)3~5岁儿童表现出不同层次和水平的错误信念理解能力;(3)具体分析儿童错误信念的理解能力发展的心理模式,发现每一年龄组具有的错误信念理解能力,都是其更高水平能力发展的基础,支持表达论。     

Does the autistic child have a metarepresentational deficit?

This study examines the claim that autistic children lack a “theory of mind” because of an inability to metarepresent. We argue that if autistic children have a “metarepresentational” deficit in Leslie's (1987, 1988) sense of the term, then they should have difficulty not only with mental representations such as false beliefs, but also with external representations such as photographs. Autistic children's understanding of photographic representations was tested using Zaitchik's (1990) task. This task is modelled on the false belief task (Baron-Cohen, Leslie, & Frith, 1985: Wimmer & Perner, 1983) but involves “false” photographs where a photographic representation does not conform with the current state of the real world. Like Zaitchik (1990) we found that normal 3 and 4-year-olds found this task as difficult as the false belief task. In sharp contrast, however, the autistic children in our study passed the photograph task but failed the false belief task. As both tasks require the ability to decouple, this evidence challenges the view that autistic children lack “metarepresentational” ability in Leslie's sense. However, the results leave open the question of whether autistic children have a metarepresentational ability in the different sense of the term intended by Pylyshyn (1978), that is, representing the relationship between a representation and what it represents.     

Children’s first and second-order false-belief reasoning in a verbal and a low-verbal task

We can understand and act upon the beliefs of other people, even when these conflict with our own beliefs. Children’s development of this ability, known as Theory of Mind, typically happens around age 4. Research using a looking-time paradigm, however, established that toddlers at the age of 15 months old pass a non-verbal false-belief task (Onishi and Baillargeon in Science 308:255–258, 2005). This is well before the age at which children pass any of the verbal false-belief tasks. In this study we present a more complex case of false-belief reasoning with older children. We tested second-order reasoning, probing children’s ability to handle the belief of one person about the belief of another person. We find just the opposite: 7-year-olds pass a verbal false-belief reasoning task, but fail on an equally complex low-verbal task. This finding suggests that language supports explicit reasoning about beliefs, perhaps by facilitating the cognitive system to keep track of beliefs attributed by people to other people.     

False-belief understanding in 2.5-year-olds: evidence from two novel verbal spontaneous-response tasks

Recent research indicates that toddlers and infants succeed at various non-verbal spontaneous-response false-belief tasks; here we asked whether toddlers would also succeed at verbal spontaneous-response false-belief tasks that imposed significant linguistic demands. We tested 2.5-year-olds using two novel tasks: a preferential-looking task in which children listened to a false-belief story while looking at a picture book (with matching and non-matching pictures), and a violation-of-expectation task in which children watched an adult 'Subject' answer (correctly or incorrectly) a standard false-belief question. Positive results were obtained with both tasks, despite their linguistic demands. These results (1) support the distinction between spontaneous- and elicited-response tasks by showing that toddlers succeed at verbal false-belief tasks that do not require them to answer direct questions about agents' false beliefs, (2) reinforce claims of robust continuity in early false-belief understanding as assessed by spontaneous-response tasks, and (3) provide researchers with new experimental tasks for exploring early false-belief understanding in neurotypical and autistic populations.     

幼儿看图叙述中心理状态术语的使用与错误信念理解关系的短期跟踪研究

摘 要：为探明汉语儿童看图叙述中心理状态术语的应用及与错误信念理解能力的关系,并追踪二者相互作用的方向,本研究以101名3-5岁儿童为研究对象,纵向探查了前后相隔3个月的儿童看图叙述中心理状态术语使用情况和错误信念能力的发展状况,并从横向和纵向两个时间点分别探讨了心理状态术语的运用与错误信念理解的关系。结果表明：3-5岁儿童错误信念理解能力快速发展;儿童看图叙述中使用较多的愿望术语和情绪术语,信念术语应用相对较少,且认知词汇类型较少。控制了一般语言能力和年龄之后,仅在第一次测验上,情绪术语、信念术语仍然与同期及后期错误信念理解能力存在显著相关。     

Exploring mental-state reasoning as a social-cognitive mechanism for social loafing in children

The authors explored mental-state reasoning ability among 72 preschoolers (ages 3-5 years) as a possible developmental mechanism for the well-known social loafing effect: diminished individual effort in a collaborative task. The authors expected that older children would outperform young children on standard mental-state reasoning tests and that they would display greater social loafing than younger children. In addition, we hypothesized that the ability to infer the mental states of others would be predictive of social loafing, but that the ability to reason about one's own knowledge would not. The authors gave children three standard false-belief tasks and participated in a within-subjects balloon inflation task that they performed both individually and as part of a group. Results indicated that 3-year-olds performed significantly below older preschoolers on mental-state reasoning tasks. Only 4- and 5-year-olds displayed diminished individual effort. Multiple regression analysis indicated that only the ability to reason about others' false beliefs accounted for a significant amount of variance in social loafing; age (in months) and own false-belief reasoning did not. The authors discussed theoretical and pedagogical implications.     

From synonyms to homonyms: exploring the role of metarepresentation in language understanding

Doherty and Perner (Metalinguistic awareness and theory of mind: just two words for the same thing? Cognitive Development, 13 (1998), 279–305) report that children’s understanding of synonyms and false belief is dependent on an understanding of the representational mind. Experiment 1 extends this finding by examining children’s understanding of homonyms. Children aged 3 and 4 years were asked to judge whether a puppet correctly selected the second member of a homonym pair. Performance on this task was strongly associated with performance on the false belief task even after chronological and verbal mental age had been accounted for. Experiment 2 incorporated two new tasks: a synonyms task and an adjectives task. Understanding of synonyms and homonyms significantly predicted performance on the false belief task. However, once chronological age was accounted for, only performance on the homonyms task did so. The difficulty experienced on the homonyms task was not due to a reluctance to acknowledge that the puppet can point to a different picture when the the same word label is used twice. Children had no difficulty on the adjectives task when the puppet had to point to a different picture described using the same adjective. The suggestion that the understanding of synonyms, homonyms and false belief are related by a common insight into the representational mind is therefore not supported.     

Representing metarepresentations: Is there Theory of Mind-specific cognition?

What cognitive mechanisms underlie Theory of Mind? Some infer domain-specific Theory of Mind cognition based the pattern of children diagnosed with autism failing the False Belief test but passing the False Photograph test. However, we argue that the False Belief test entails various task demands the False Photograph task does not, including the necessity to represent a higher-order representation (a metarepresentation), thus confounding the inference of domain-specificity. Instead, a general difficulty that affects representations of metarepresentations might account for the seeming domain-specific failure. Here we find that False-Belief failing False-Photograph passing children fail the Meta Photograph test, a new photograph-domain test that requires subjects to represent a metarepresentation. We conclude that people who fail the False Belief test but pass the False Photograph test do not necessarily have a content-specific Theory of Mind deficit. Instead, the general ability to represent representations and metarepresentations might underlie Theory of Mind.     

Children's performance on a false-belief task is impaired by activation of an evolutionarily-canalized response system

We examine whether children's performance on a false-belief task is impaired by task content that activates an early-developing, prepotent motivational system: predator-avoidance. In two studies (N = 46 and N = 37), children aged 3-4 years completed variants of a false-belief task that involved predator-avoidance, playmate-avoidance, prey-seeking, and playmate-seeking, respectively. The proportion of correct answers on the playmate-avoidance task (Study 1: 52%; Study 2: 51%) was significantly greater than the proportion of correct answers on the analogous predator-avoidance task (Study 1: 28%; Study 2: 22%). This difference was not an artifact of children generally performing better on playmate stories than on predator-prey stories. The findings are consistent with the hypothesis that activation of the predator-avoidance system generates prepotent response patterns that pre-empt full consideration of the mental states of the prey characters in false-belief stories.     

Communicative interactions, knowledge of a second language, and theory of mind in young children

In this study, the authors explored the effect that particular patterns of communicative interactions may have on young children's understanding of representations and the link between knowledge of a 2nd language and theory of mind. The authors tested 140 single language users and 57 dual language users (aged 3-4 years old) on a deceptive task with 3 experimental conditions. In the deceptive-context condition, an experimenter made a reference to the deceptive object. In the older peer condition, an experimenter made a reference to an older child who was actively participating in the experimental manipulations. In the deceptive-interaction condition, the experimenter made reference to his or her own deceptive interventions. The most significant finding was that knowledge of a 2nd language significantly improved young children's understanding of both mental and nonmental representations. Moreover, the results indicated that an experimenter's reference to a deceptive interaction greatly facilitated 3-year-old children's understanding of false belief.     

Children with autism can track others' beliefs in a competitive game

Theory of mind (ToM) development, assessed via ‘litmus’ false belief tests, is severely delayed in autism, but the standard testing procedure may underestimate these children's genuine understanding. To explore this, we developed a novel test involving competition to win a reward as the motive for tracking other players' beliefs (the ‘Dot‐Midge task’). Ninety‐six children, including 23 with autism (mean age: 10.36 years), 50 typically developing 4‐year‐olds (mean age: 4.40) and 23 typically developing 3‐year‐olds (mean age: 3.59) took a standard ‘Sally‐Ann’ false belief test, the Dot‐Midge task (which was closely matched to the Sally‐Ann task procedure) and a norm‐referenced verbal ability test. Results revealed that, of the children with autism, 74% passed the Dot‐Midge task, yet only 13% passed the standard Sally‐Ann procedure. A similar pattern of performance was observed in the older, but not the younger, typically developing control groups. This finding demonstrates that many children with autism who fail motivationally barren standard false belief tests can spontaneously use ToM to track their social partners’ beliefs in the context of a competitive game.     

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.