Is Theory of Mind at 36 Months Related to False Belief Reasoning at 52 Months?

• In Event: Poster Session 10
  In Poster Session: PS 10 Topic - Social Cognition

Abstract

Recent findings of false belief understanding in 30- and 33-month-old children under reduced processing and linguistic demands (Setoh et al., 2016; Scott & Baillargeon, 2017) have cast doubt on the view that children only start to attribute false beliefs from four years of age on (Wellman et al., 2001). However, several researchers have raised concerns regarding the validity of this newly developed task format (Fenici & Garofoli, 2020; Rubio-Fernández et al., 2017). If the new low-inhibition false belief task is a valid measure of false belief understanding and if there is continuity in false belief understanding from infancy to childhood (Setoh et al., 2016), performance in this task should be related to explicit false belief understanding in traditional tasks at age four. Longitudinal relations between children’s early mental state reasoning abilities such as perspective-taking, mental state language or joint attention and their later explicit false belief understanding are well-documented (Bigelow & Dugas, 2009; Kristen et al., 2011; Sodian & Kristen-Antonow, 2015; Yeung et al., 2019). Though, investigations of longitudinal relations between performance in the low-inhibition false belief task (Setoh et al., 2016) and later explicit false belief understanding are still missing.

The present study’s objective was thus to investigate the relation between performance in the low-inhibition false belief task assessed at 33 and 36 months and children’s explicit false belief understanding at 52 months. Apart from children’s early false belief understanding (Setoh et al., 2016), also their mental state lexicon (Bretherton & Beeghly, 1989), and their visual and epistemic perspective-taking (Gonzales et al., 2018) were assessed at 36 months. At 52 months of age, the two explicit false belief tasks from the Theory of Mind scale by Wellman and Liu (2004) were employed.

We hypothesize that performance in the low-inhibition false belief task at 33 and at 36 months of age is positively related to explicit false belief understanding at 52 months. We will investigate this using Spearman’s rank correlations and ordinal regressions. We further hypothesize that this relation is independent of general IQ using partial correlations and hierarchical ordinal regressions. We also assume that mental state lexicon, and visual and epistemic perspective-taking at 36 months are positively related to explicit false belief understanding at 52 months and we will investigate this using Spearman’s rank correlations and ordinal regression analyses. We further hypothesize that these relations are independent of general IQ and we will analyze this using partial correlations and hierarchical ordinal regressions. So far, N = 63 children have been assessed at 36 and 52 months of age. By the time of the conference, data from approximately N = 75 children will be available. Data analysis will be completed by the end of February.

The present study sheds light on longitudinal relations between performance in the low-inhibition false belief task and later explicit false belief understanding. Positive longitudinal relations would support the validity of the low-inhibition false belief task as a measure of early false belief understanding and would imply continuity in children’s development of mental state reasoning skills.

Authors

• Larissa Jasmin Kaltefleiter, University of Munich
  Presenting Author

• Tobias Schuwerk, LMU Munich
  Non-Presenting Author

• Susanne Kristen-Antonow
  Non-Presenting Author

• Beate Sodian, University of Munich Germany
  Non-Presenting Author