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False‐belief understanding in 2.5‐year‐olds: evidence from two novel verbal spontaneous‐response tasks
Author(s) -
Scott Rose M.,
He Zijing,
Baillargeon Renée,
Cummins Denise
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
developmental science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.801
H-Index - 127
eISSN - 1467-7687
pISSN - 1363-755X
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2011.01103.x
Subject(s) - psychology , false belief , neurotypical , task (project management) , theory of mind , cognitive psychology , false memory , cognition , developmental psychology , social psychology , recall , autism , autism spectrum disorder , management , neuroscience , economics
Recent research indicates that toddlers and infants succeed at various non‐verbal spontaneous‐response false‐belief tasks; here we asked whether toddlers would also succeed at verbal spontaneous‐response false‐belief tasks that imposed significant linguistic demands. We tested 2.5‐year‐olds using two novel tasks: a preferential‐looking task in which children listened to a false‐belief story while looking at a picture book (with matching and non‐matching pictures), and a violation‐of‐expectation task in which children watched an adult ‘Subject’ answer (correctly or incorrectly) a standard false‐belief question. Positive results were obtained with both tasks, despite their linguistic demands. These results (1) support the distinction between spontaneous‐ and elicited‐response tasks by showing that toddlers succeed at verbal false‐belief tasks that do not require them to answer direct questions about agents’ false beliefs, (2) reinforce claims of robust continuity in early false‐belief understanding as assessed by spontaneous‐response tasks, and (3) provide researchers with new experimental tasks for exploring early false‐belief understanding in neurotypical and autistic populations.