Do young children track other's beliefs, or merely their perceptual access? An interactive, anticipatory measure of early theory of mind

Abstract

This paper aimed to contribute to answering three questions.First, how robust and reliable are early implicit measures offalsebelief(FB)understanding?Second,dothesemeasurestap FB understanding rather than simpler processes such astracking the protagonist's perceptual access? Third, do implicitFB tasks tap an earlier, more basic form of theory of mind(ToM) than standard verbal tasks? We conducted a conceptualreplication of Garnham & Perner's task (Garnham and Perner2001Br.J.Dev.Psychol.19,413-432) simultaneously measuringchildren's anticipatory looking and interactive behaviourstoward an agent with a true or FB (N=81,M=40 months).Additionally, we implemented an ignorance condition and astandard FB task. We successfully replicated the originalfindings: children's looking and interactive behaviour differedaccording to the agent's true or FB. However, children mostlydid not differentiate between FB and ignorance conditions invarious measures of anticipation and uncertainty, suggestingthe use of simpler conceptual strategies than full-blown ToM.Moreover, implicit measures were all related to each other butlargely not related to performance in the standard FB task,except for first look in the FB condition. Overall, our findingssuggest that these implicit measures are robust but may not tapthe same underlying cognitive capacity as explicit FB tasks.