Pre-schoolers’ ability to integrate information on tool efficiency with false beliefs

• In Event: Poster Session 01
  In Poster Session: PS 01 Topic - Social Cognition

Abstract

Research on Theory of Mind (ToM) abilities suggest that children from very early on are able to track someone else’s beliefs in simple scenarios, for instance beliefs about the location or the presence or absence of an object. However, little is known about how flexible these early ToM abilities are, and whether children are able to integrate various information when tracking others’ beliefs. Importantly, belief attributions in everyday social interactions are not be limited to encoding belief contents regarding the absence or presence of objects, but they oftentimes involve more complex contents, such as relational ones. In a set of experiments, we investigate whether 3-to-6-year-old children are able to predict a character’s action based on his beliefs regarding the efficiency of a tool. Attributing beliefs regarding efficiency may be more complex than beliefs about locations, as tool efficiency conveys information about the relation between a cause and an outcome.
We tested this issue across three age groups: 3, 4 and 5-year-olds. Children were first familiarized with a set of inefficient and efficient tools operated by a puppet, who aimed to obtain his balls from a long tube with the help of sticks which varied in length. The different sticks had different causal contributions in obtaining a reward (long sticks were successful, short ones were not). After a short familiarization, the puppet placed the short and long sticks in two different boxes that varied only in colour (blue and green) in a way that only the sticks’ undistinguishable endings were visible, and then he left the scene. From this point on we implemented two different false belief scenarios. In the complex scenario, the experimenter tore off the ending of the long stick, so that the long stick became as short as the short stick, and then reattached this ending to the originally short stick, which now became long. Afterwards she put back both sticks into the boxes in the same arrangement as the puppet left them. In a simpler false belief scenario, we aimed to eliminate the reality bias (that one of the sticks is longer and thus more efficient) and thus the experimenter simply tore off the ending of the long stick and put it away. Afterwards the experimenter put back both sticks into the boxes in the same arrangement as the puppet left them. Upon the puppet’s return, children were asked to predict which box he will choose in order to retrieve the balls from the tube.
Our results suggest that 5-year-old children (N=24) tended to predict correctly the character’s behaviour based on his false belief in the complex task, (p=.06, binomial test), whereas 4-year-old (N=24) and 3-year-old children (N=24) passed the simplified false belief task only (p=.021, and p=.001 binomial test).
These findings together with additional positive findings from on-going control experiments would indicate that young children, similarly to adults, can integrate information of different complexity in false belief reasoning.

Authors

• Paula Fischer, Ceu
  Presenting Author

• Erno Teglas, Central European University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Ágnes M. Kovács, Central European University
  Non-Presenting Author