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.