Abstract
False belief tasks have enjoyed a monopoly in the research on children’s development of a theory of mind. They have been granted this status because they promise to deliver an unambiguous assessment of children’s understanding of the representational nature of mental states. Their poor cousins, true belief tasks, have been relegated to occasional service as control tasks. That this is their only role has been due to the universal assumption that correct answers on true belief tasks are inherently ambiguous regarding the level of the child’s understanding of mental states. It has also been due to the universal assumption that nothing in the child’s developing theory of mind would lead to systematically incorrect answers on true belief tasks. We review new findings that 4- and 5-year-olds do err, systematically and profoundly, on the true belief versions of all the extant belief tasks. This reveals an intermediate level of understanding in the development of children’s theory of mind. Researchers have been unaware of this intermediate level because it produces correct answers in false belief tasks. A simple two-task battery—one true belief task and one false belief task—is sufficient to remove the ambiguity from each task. The new findings show that children do not acquire an understanding of beliefs, and hence a representational theory of mind, until after 6 years of age, or 2 years later than most developmental psychologists have concluded. This raises the question of how to interpret other new findings that infants are able to pass false belief tasks. We review these new infant studies, as well as recent studies on chimpanzees, in light of older children’s failure on true belief tasks, and end with some speculation about how all of these new findings might be reconciled.
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Notes
Gilbert Harman (1978) made a similar suggestion in regards to studying chimpanzee theory of mind, and other philosophers had previously stressed the importance of understanding false belief for having the concept BELIEF. Donald Davidson (1975), e.g. argues that “Someone cannot have a belief unless he understands the possibility of being mistaken, and this requires grasping the contrast between truth and error—true belief and false belief” (p. 170).
Perner and Horn (2003) tested the PAR hypothesis using a variation of the three-alternative false belief procedure designed to be simpler than that used by Fabricius and Khalil, and they concluded that their findings refuted the hypothesis. Their study had several unexplained findings, however, which Fabricius and Khalil (2003) argue cast doubt on that conclusion. In addition, Fabricius and Frederick (under review) failed to replicate Perner and Horn’s findings against the hypothesis.
There is independent evidence that the child’s understanding of ‘know’ undergoes much development during these years regarding its relation to both perceptual access and correct versus incorrect behavior (e.g., Perner 1991).
Two previous studies reported children’s failure on true belief tasks (Friedman et al. 2003; Ruffman 1996), although both sets of researchers assumed that children’s difficulty with true belief was unique to the particular tasks used in their studies, and was not indicative of a general pattern of reasoning used across different tasks. See Fabricius et al. (2010) for further discussion.
For chimpanzees, the input is perhaps further constrained to goals that are shared by the subject, as evidenced by indications that better understanding of others’ mental states is elicited in experimental tasks that involve competition with conspecifics (e.g., Kaminski et al. 2008). For human infants, the other’s goal does not have to be one that the infant also wants, as evidenced by their success in passive, looking time tasks. For instance, studies involving pointing by preverbal infants appears to demonstrate understanding of goals which they don’t share and cooperation with adults (Liszkowski et al. 2008).
Southgate et al. (2007) pointed out that infants in those two studies could have used a specific rule applicable to transfer tasks that they presumably had learned from other experiences (i.e., that agents who do not witness an object being moved will look in the wrong place for it). As the authors tacitly acknowledge, the true belief tasks in those studies do not control for that possibility either.
An interesting study by Song et al. (2008) indicates that Rule A can be re-triggered for 18-month-olds by witnessing an agent receive verbal communication about a situation. In their task, an agent hid a ball in a box and was absent when it was moved it to a cup. When she returned, if the experimenter told her “The ball is in the cup!” children expected her to get it right and search in the cup; otherwise, they expected her to get it wrong. The statement apparently signaled a new situation and elicited a re-application of Rule A, just as if the agent had gotten direct (visual, tactile) perceptual access to the situation.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Fall 2009 seminar participants Caroline Appleton, Snjezana Huerta, Cecilea Mun, and Nick Smith for helpful and critical discussions of some of the topics presented in this paper. We would also like to thank Bernard Kobes, Eric Schwitzgebel, Victoria Southgate and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on an earlier drafts of this paper.
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Hedger, J.A., Fabricius, W.V. True Belief Belies False Belief: Recent Findings of Competence in Infants and Limitations in 5-Year-Olds, and Implications for Theory of Mind Development. Rev.Phil.Psych. 2, 429–447 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-011-0069-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-011-0069-9