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Simplifying Second‐order Belief Attribution: What Facilitates Children’s Performance on Measures of Conceptual Understanding?
Author(s) -
Coull Greig J.,
Leekam Susan R.,
Bennett Mark
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
social development
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.078
H-Index - 91
eISSN - 1467-9507
pISSN - 0961-205X
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9507.2006.00340.x
Subject(s) - ignorance , attribution , psychology , task (project management) , order (exchange) , false belief , cognitive psychology , information processing , theory of mind , social psychology , developmental psychology , cognition , epistemology , philosophy , management , finance , neuroscience , economics
This study investigated how 4‐ to 7‐year‐old children’s second‐order belief attribution might be facilitated by either reducing information processing or varying the sequence of task questions. In Experiment 1, compared with Perner and Wimmer’s (1985) original second‐order false‐belief task, a new task with reduced information‐processing demands promoted better second‐order reasoning. In Experiment 2, half the stories included a second‐order ignorance question before a second‐order belief question. The ignorance question promoted second‐order belief understanding, superseding the improvement induced by lowered processing demands. Together, the findings suggest that second‐order belief performance can be facilitated if children focus on the concept of ignorance during the sequence of questioning.