Poster #189 - Do two-year-olds ascribe beliefs or knowledge in an interactive helping false belief task?

• In Event: 3-053 - Poster Session 10
  In Poster Session: PS 10 Section - Social Cognition

Integrative Statement

In Theory of Mind (ToM) research, explicit false belief tasks have long been the litmus test for children’s understanding of others’ mental states. Competence in such tasks emerges from around age four. In the last decade, however, non-explicit tasks have been developed that suggest much earlier competence, including spontaneous helping tasks. In one influential version of such a task, an agent put an object in one of two boxes. The object was then transferred to the other box in the agent’s presence (true belief; TB) or absence (false belief; FB). Finally, the agents tried to open the empty box (unsuccessfully) and children’s spontaneous helping was recorded. Results revealed that 18-months-old infants tended to help by opening the empty box in the TB, but by opening the box containing the object in the FB condition. This pattern has been interpreted as evidence for early belief reasoning. However, the pattern itself is highly ambiguous and can be explained more parsimoniously, for example by mere teleological reasoning (e.g. Priewasser et al., 2018). The rationale of the present study, therefore, was to design a novel and more stringent interactive helping task that does not suffer from these ambiguities. To this end, we adapted a nonverbal change-of-location tasks by Call and Tomasello (1999) for the use with younger children (Figure 1): 2-year-olds (N=60) watched how an experimenter put an object into one of two identical looking boxes without knowing into which. The boxes were then swapped in the presence (TB) or absence (FB) of the experimenter. Finally, the experimenter unsuccessfully tried to open one box and search for the object, and children’s spontaneous searching and helping behavior was recorded. The child’s task was to locate the object by reasoning from the experimenter’s belief-based search (“She knows where the object is, so if she searches here, it will be here (TB); she has a false belief, so if she searches here, it will be there (FB)). Results show that children’s responses differed between conditions (χ²(1, N=60) = 5.71, p=0.03; figure 2): children looked more often for the object in the box targeted by the experimenter than in the other box in the TB condition, but performed at chance level in the FB condition (TB: p=0.01; FB: p=0.86; binomial test, two-tailed). This pattern of differential response, however, also remains ambiguous: It could reflect belief ascription (complicated by inhibitory demands in the FB condition), or merely tracking of knowledge versus ignorance. Therefore, two follow-up studies are currently being conducted (in progress). First, we replicate our FB condition to assess the robustness of the effect. Second, we implement new control conditions to tease apart knowledge-ignorance tracking and proper belief ascription (inspired by a control condition of Kaminski et al., 2008). Taken together, this set of studies will allow us to assess more conclusively what spontaneous helping reveals about early theory of mind.

Authors

• Lisa Wenzel, University of Göttingen
  Presenting Author

• Marina Proft, University of Göttingen
  Non-Presenting Author

• Hannes Rakoczy, University of Gottingen
  Non-Presenting Author