From infants' to children's appreciation of belief

Abstract

Evidence is accumulating that infants are sensitive to people's false beliefs, whereas children pass the standard false belief test at around 4 years of age. Debate currently centres on the nature of early and late understanding. We defend the view that early sensitivity to false beliefs shown in 'online tasks' (where engagement with ongoing events reflects an expectation of what will happen without a judgement that it will happen) reflects implicit/unconscious social knowledge of lawful regularities. The traditional false belief task requires explicit consideration of the agent's subjective perspective on his reasons for action. This requires an intentional switch of perspectives not possible before 4 years of age as evidenced by correlations between the false belief task and many different perspective-taking tasks.

Figure 1

Identity task by Low and Watts. Location false belief task (not shown, general set-up similar to figure). Children watch (i) the agent looking how the object is put under the left cover and (ii) that the agent is distracted by a phone call and looks away while the object is moved to under the other cover. (iii) The agent attends to the scene again and the windows start blinking. (iv) The child's eye gaze to left or right window is recorded as an indicator of where the child expects the agent's hand to appear. (v) The child is asked where the hand will appear. Identity task. (a) Establishing preference. Children learn that the agent, who watches a red object disappear under one cover and a blue object under the other cover, always prefers to retrieve the blue object through the window that is closest to that object. Before the agent reaches through one of the windows, the windows blink, which makes children look in anticipation to the window they expect the hand to appear. After training, children looked to the window behind the cover with the blue object 94% of times at 3 years and 100% at 4 years. (b) False belief test. (i) Children are shown that a red robot is under the left cover. (ii) The agent appears. (iii) The child sees how the agent observes the robot (now with its blue side facing the child) move from under the left to the right cover. (iv) The child but not the agent observes that the red robot is blue on its other side. (v) The child sees how the agent observes the robot move from under the right to the left cover. (vi) The windows blink indicating that the agent is about to search for a blue object. (vii) The child's eye gaze to the left or right window is recorded as an indicator of where the child expects the agent's hand to appear. (viii) The child is asked where the hand will appear. (c) Results. In the false belief location version (green triangles in panel c) , almost all 3-year-olds look in anticipation to the window in front of the cover where the agent thinks the object is (broken green line), whereas only about 30% make the corresponding prediction in answer to a question (full green line). This percentage increases by 4 years and reaches a ceiling in college students. According to the new false belief identity version red squares in panel c, children's predictions (full red line) lag slightly behind the location version. In stark contrast, there is almost no anticipatory looking (broken red line) by children and even college students (≥19 years). This shows that anticipatory looking occurs only when an experiential record based on Level 1 perspective taking is available (location version) but not otherwise as in Low and Watt's ‘identity’ problem.