Let’s do it together! The role of interaction in false belief understanding

Worse Theory of Mind in Only-Children Compared to Children With Siblings and Its Intervention

The purpose of this study was to explore theory of mind (ToM) differences in children with different birth orders (only-children, first-born children, and second-born children), and further explore the effect of cognitive verb training for only-children's ToM. Adopting the paradigm of false belief, Study 1 was conducted in which a sample of 120 children aged 3-6, including first-born children, second-born children (siblings aged 1-13 years), and only-children were tested. The results showed that (1) children aged 3-6 had significantly higher scores on first-order false-belief than second-order false-belief. (2) Controlling for age, the only-children scored significantly lower than the first-born children. In Study 2, 28 only-children aged 4-5 (13 in the experimental group and 15 in the control group) who initially failed in false-belief tasks were trained with the cognitive verb animations. Significant post-training improvements were observed for only-children who received training of animations embedded with cognitive verb. Those findings indicated that ToM of only-children was significantly worse than first-born children of two-child families, and linguistic training could facilitate ToM of only-children whose ToM were at a disadvantage.

The coin that is most current is flattery? Stability and discontinuity of false praise-telling from 5 to 7 years of life

Preschool children engage in flattery behaviors, including expressing opinions toward other people or objects that-although favorable-are not truly held. Research shows that in the following years, the number and complexity of motives underlying such insincere behavior increase. The current study focused on children's overt behavior, examining two aspects of the development of false praise-telling: individual stability and group-level discontinuity. Using an art-rating task, a total of 164 children aged 5 to 7 years were tested at three points in time (T1/2/3): M_T1 age = 5.66 years, SD = 0.1; M_T2 age = 6.65 years, SD = 0.16; M_T3 age = 7.61 years, SD = 0.14. The results show that, having become capable of giving false praise in politeness settings at 5.5 years of age, children continue to flatter others in this way at later ages, indicating that false praise-telling is an individually stable characteristic. In addition, a statistically significant increase in the proportion of false praise-telling to non-lying behavior in children over the 2-year study period was observed. This indicates that the discontinuity, namely the growth in children's flattery behavior, occurs from 5 to 7 years of age. The findings are discussed with respect to the diverse factors that might underlie and affect children's tendency to praise others falsely in politeness settings.

Pragmatics in the False-Belief Task: Let the Robot Ask the Question!

The poor performances of typically developing children younger than 4 in the first-order false-belief task "Maxi and the chocolate" is analyzed from the perspective of conversational pragmatics. An ambiguous question asked by an adult experimenter (perceived as a teacher) can receive different interpretations based on a search for relevance, by which children according to their age attribute different intentions to the questioner, within the limits of their own meta-cognitive knowledge. The adult experimenter tells the child the following story of object-transfer: "Maxi puts his chocolate into the green cupboard before going out to play. In his absence, his mother moves the chocolate from the green cupboard to the blue one." The child must then predict where Maxi will pick up the chocolate when he returns. To the child, the question from an adult (a knowledgeable person) may seem surprising and can be understood as a question of his own knowledge of the world, rather than on Maxi's mental representations. In our study, without any modification of the initial task, we disambiguate the context of the question by (1) replacing the adult experimenter with a humanoid robot presented as "ignorant" and "slow" but trying to learn and (2) placing the child in the role of a "mentor" (the knowledgeable person). Sixty-two typical children of 3 years-old completed the first-order false belief task "Maxi and the chocolate," either with a human or with a robot. Results revealed a significantly higher success rate in the robot condition than in the human condition. Thus, young children seem to fail because of the pragmatic difficulty of the first-order task, which causes a difference of interpretation between the young child and the experimenter.

2.5-year-olds succeed in identity and location elicited-response false-belief tasks with adequate response practice

Researchers have argued that traditional elicited-response false-belief tasks involve considerable processing demands and hence underestimate children's false-belief understanding. Consistent with this claim, Setoh et al. (2016) recently found that when processing demands were sufficiently reduced, children could succeed in an elicited-response task as early as 2.5 years of age. Here we examined whether 2.5-year-olds could also succeed in a low-demand elicited-response task involving false beliefs about identity, which have been argued to provide a critical test of whether children truly represent beliefs, while also clarifying how the practice trials in Setoh et al.'s task facilitated children's elicited-response performance. 2.5-year-olds were tested in a version of Setoh et al.'s elicited-response task in which they heard a location or identity false-belief story. We varied whether the practice trials had the same type of wh-question as the test trial. Children who heard the same type of wh-question on all trials succeeded regardless of which story they heard (location or identity) and performance did not differ across belief type. This replicates Setoh et al.'s positive results and demonstrates that when processing demands are sufficiently reduced, children can succeed in elicited-response tasks involving false beliefs about object location or identity. This suggests that children are capable of attributing genuine false beliefs prior to 4 years of age. However, children performed at chance if the practice trials involved a different type of wh-question than the test trials, suggesting that at this age practice with the wh-question used in the test trial is essential to children's success.

Mistaken max befriends Duplo girl: No difference between a standard and an acted-out false belief task

With their Duplo task, Rubio-Fernández and Geurts (2013) challenged the assumption that children under 4 years of age cannot pass the standard false belief test. In an attempt to replicate this task on a sample of 73 children aged 32–51 months, we added a standard change of location false belief task as well as a Duplo true belief task. Performance on the latter is crucial for interpreting answers in the Duplo false belief task as to whether they reflect evidence for understanding or merely exhibit a difference in guessing rate. We found (a) a greater variability of response types in both Duplo tasks, (b) no evidence that responses in the Duplo tasks reveal earlier competence than those in the standard false belief test, and (c) a reassuring correlation between false belief tasks, suggesting that the Duplo task does pick up understanding of belief in light of the standard test.

Removing shared information improves 3- and 4-year-olds' performance on a change-of-location explicit false belief task

The classic change-of-location explicit false belief task ends with a test question of the form "Where will the [agent] look for the [object]?" It has been proposed that by including mention of the target object, the question creates unwanted attention to the actual object location. A standard explanation is that children are biased to answer according to their own knowledge of reality. We proposed that mention of the target object brings attention to the reality location via memory-based processes that are biased to retrieve previous shared information. We manipulated whether the experimenter who asked the test question had witnessed the change of location with the children. For the experimental group (age range = 3.00-4.17 years, M_age = 3.61 years, SD = 0.36), a second experimenter took the place of the first after the object location was changed. Performance was compared with a control group (age range = 3.00-4.25 years, M_age = 3.66 years, SD = 0.34) in which one experimenter conducted the whole procedure. Participants also undertook the Bear/Dragon task, a test of conflict inhibitory control. In the control group, 6 of 19 children (32%) passed, similar to previous results. In the experimental group, 12 of 19 (63%) passed. The groups did not differ significantly on their inhibitory control scores, and a logistic regression analysis revealed that only condition significantly predicted performance. We conclude that a bias toward shared information is a relevant factor in understanding children's difficulty with the standard test question used in the change-of-location explicit false belief task.

Memory and inferential processes in false-belief tasks: An investigation of the unexpected-contents paradigm

This study investigated the extent to which 3- and 4-year-old children may rely on associative memory representations to pass an unexpected-contents false-belief task. In Experiment 1, 4-year-olds performed at chance in both a standard Smarties task and a modified version highlighting the secrecy of the contents of the tube. These results were interpreted as evidence that having to infer the answer to a false-belief question (without relying on memory representations) is generally difficult for preschool children. In Experiments 2a, 2b, and 2c, 3-year-olds were tested at 3-month intervals during their first year of preschool and showed better performance in a narrative version of the Smarties task (chance level) than in the standard version (below-chance level). These children performed even better in an associative version of the narrative task (above-chance level) where they could form a memory representation associating the protagonist with the expected contents of a box. The results of a true-belief control suggest that some of these children may have relied on their memory of the protagonist's preference for the original contents of the box (rather than their understanding of what the protagonist was expecting to find inside). This suggests that when 3-year-olds passed the associative unexpected-contents task, some may have been keeping track of the protagonist's initial preference and not only (or not necessarily) of the protagonist's false belief. These results are interpreted in the light of current accounts of Theory of Mind development and failed replications of verbal false-belief tasks.