Poster #198 - Limits on the curse of knowledge in children with a higher-order theory of mind

• In Event: 2-110 - Poster Session 07
  In Poster Session: PS 07 Section - Social Cognition

Integrative Statement

A central problem of standard false belief tasks involves overcoming one’s own knowledge of a situation when reasoning about others. Several studies have found that even adults and children who can pass false belief tasks will often be influenced by the “curse of knowledge,” a general bias towards one’s own perspective when reasoning about others (Birch & Bloom, 2003; 2007; Sommerville, et. al., 2013). However, a recent large-scale study (Ryskin & Brown-Schmidt, 2014) failed to replicate the curse of knowledge effect in adults which calls for a reevaluation of the effect in children as well.
Studies of the curse of knowledge in young children often rely on comparisons with standard false belief tasks. However, there are changes in children’s theory of mind beyond what is captured by these tasks alone. Several studies have incorporated children’s performance both true and false belief tasks (Fabricius, et. al. 2010; Perner, et. al., 2015) to measure higher-order aspects of children’s theory of mind and to rule out lower-level strategies in children’s reasoning. Four-year-old’s who pass standard false-belief also tend to fail true belief tasks or struggle to adequately justify their answers.
The current study investigated the relation between measures of the curse of knowledge and higher-order theory of mind. Preschool age children (N = 24, Mage = 54 months) completed a continuous change-of-location task (Sommerville, et. al, 2013), and both a standard true and false-belief version of an unexpected contents task (Fabricius, et. al., 2010). In the continuous change-of-location task, children watched as a doll buried an object in one side of a rectangular-sandbox and then as the object was moved to the center when the doll was out of sight. Children were asked where the doll would look for the object which was measured from the center (reality) location as either towards or away from the first (belief) location. For the unexpected-contents tasks, children had to pass both the true- and false-belief version of the task and correctly justify their answers (e.g., saying a person will think there are bandages because of the picture on the band-aid box).
Analyses revealed that children with a higher-order theory of mind said the doll would look further away from the reality location in the sandbox task than other children, t (22) = 3.37, p = .003, and that this distance was not significantly different from the belief location, t (7) = -.479, p = .649. When only considering performance on the false belief task, the distance for children who passed the false task was significantly different from the belief location, t (10) = -6.610, p < .001. These results suggest that young children with a higher-order theory of mind are less susceptible to the curse of knowledge than previously reported, and that prior studies' findings were potentially biased by including children with lower level reasoning strategies in their comparisons.

Authors

• Christopher Gonzales, Oregon State University
  Presenting Author

• Quenten Benner, Arizona State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• William Fabricius, Arizona State University
  Non-Presenting Author