Definition
The Smarties Task is a subtype of false-belief tasks that is used to test for theory of mind.
Introduction
The Smarties Task constitutes a by now classical paradigm often used in theory of mind experiments. In this procedure, children are shown a tube of “Smarties” (the brand name of a kind of chocolate candy) and asked to guess its contents. As expected, they typically reply by saying that the tube contains Smarties. Then the experimenter opens the tube, and it turns out that it actually contained an unlikely object (e.g., pencils). At this point, children may be confronted with two different situations: (1) a situation where they should state what another child (who has been waiting outside the room and did not witness the disclosure of the contents of the Smarties tube) would think the tube contained and (2) a situation where the child is asked what he or she initially thought the tube contained (Perner et al. 1987...
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References
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Topaloglu, S. (2019). Smarties Task, The. In: Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_3121-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_3121-1
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